edited by meredith a. crowleydigamoo.free.fr/tradewarcepr19.pdf · 2019-06-27 · the clash of...

Trade WarThe Clash of Economic Systems Endangering Global Prosperity

Edited by Meredith A. Crowley

A VoxEU.org eBook CEPR Press

Contents

Foreword vii

Introduction 1Meredith A. Crowley

Part 1: The origins of the trade conflict

1 The costs of US trade liberalisation with China have been acute for some workers 13Justin R. Pierce and Peter K. Schott

2 The 2018 trade war and the end of dispute settlement as we knew it 21Chad P. Bown

3 Understanding trade wars 33Aaditya Mattoo and Robert W. Staiger

Part 2: The costs of trade wars

4 The costs of a trade war 45Ralph Ossa

5 How exporters respond to tariff changes 51Doireann Fitzgerald

6 Trade wars in the GVC era 57Emily J. Blanchard

7 Supply chain linkages and financial markets: Evaluating the costs of the US-China trade war 65Yi Huang, Chen Lin, Sibo Liu and Heiwai Tang

Part 3: The challenges for the world trading system

8 Misdirection and the trade war malediction of 2018: Scaling the US–China bilateral tariff hikes 75Simon J. Evenett and Johannes Fritz

9 The never-ending story: The puzzle of subsidies 85Luca Rubini

10 The policy uncertainty aftershocks of trade wars and trade tensions 95Kyle Handley and Nuno Limão

11 China’s rise and the growing doubts over trade multilateralism 101Mark Wu

vii

Foreword

A trade war of unprecedented scope and magnitude currently engulfs the world’s two

largest economies – the US and China – and there are signs that this may spread more

widely to engulf the EU.

This extremely timely eBook seeks to shed light on the origins of this economic conflict,

the current impacts of the conflict on economic activity around the world, and the likely

consequences for the future of globalisation. It starts from the accession of China to the

WTO and then describes how China’s development and economic integration has led

to the world’s largest trade conflict in decades. Finally, it questions whether the rules-

based multilateral trading system will survive in an environment where the degree of

future economic policy cooperation is very uncertain.

The authors’ view is that the outlook for the future of the multilateral trading system

are grim, with few potential means of achieving substantive reform. The difficult

question of how to integrate the fundamentally different economic systems of Western

liberal capitalism and Chinese state capitalism has no easy answers. Yet, in the middle

of negotiations to resolve the US-China conflict, it is important to remember that

over the last 75 years the current open and liberal multilateral trading system has

delivered enormous benefits. The main question now facing policymakers is whether

the multilateral trading system can be redeveloped and renewed in order to continue

delivering economic prosperity.

CEPR is grateful to Dr Meredith Crowley for her editorship of this eBook. Our thanks

also go to Anil Shamdasani for his excellent and swift handling of its production.

CEPR, which takes no institutional positions on economic policy matters, is delighted

to provide a platform for an exchange of views on this important topic.

Tessa Ogden

Chief Executive Officer, CEPR

June 2019

1

Introduction

Meredith A. CrowleyUniversity of Cambridge and CEPR

A trade war of unprecedented scope and magnitude currently engulfs the world’s two

largest economies – the US and China. As of mid-May 2019, US President Donald

Trump has imposed import tariffs of 25% on roughly $250 billion of Chinese goods and

has initiated an administrative process to expand tariff coverage to the remaining $300

billion of US imports from China. In the first round of the trade war, China retaliated

with 25% tariffs on $50 billion of imports from the US in July-August 2018, followed

by tariffs ranging from 5% to 10% on $60 billion of imports in September 2018. In

response to the US escalation of the trade war in mid-May 2019, China has indicated

that it will ratchet up its existing tariffs on US merchandise to 25% (Bown 2019).

As the US-China trade war continues, there are indications that the economic conflict

could spread. The EU trade commissioner has made it clear that if the US institutes new

import tariffs on autos and auto parts from the EU, it will meet them with retaliatory

tariffs of its own.

This book seeks to shed light on the origins of this economic conflict, the current impacts

of the conflict on economic activity around the world, and the likely consequences

for the future of globalisation. It is a story in three acts, beginning with the accession

of China to the World Trade Organization (WTO), tracing through the story of how

China’s development and economic integration through global trade led to the world’s

largest trade conflict in decades, and ending with questions about whether the rules-

based multilateral trading system will survive and flourish or stagnate and fumble in an

environment of uncertainty over future economic policy cooperation.

Trade War: The Clash of Economic Systems Endangering Global Prosperity

2

The origins of the US–China trade conflict

The book opens with three different perspectives on the origins of the US–China trade

war. Justin Pierce and Peter Schott’s contribution examines how import competition

from China contributed to geographically concentrated declines in US manufacturing

employment. China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 resulted in a dramatic increase

in US imports from China and a restructuring of US firms’ global supply chains into

China. The transition of disemployed manufacturing workers into new jobs was slow

or simply failed to occur. Ultimately, although China’s entry into the WTO created

substantial welfare gains for the average American consumer by lowering prices (Amiti

et al. 2017), those Americans who lost their jobs from import competition have never

fully recovered. Arguably, the concentration of the costs of freer trade on these workers

is behind the rise in popular support for import restrictions among certain constituencies

in the US (Autor et al. 2017, Fajgelbaum et al. 2019).

But why did the US instigate a bilateral trade war to address concerns over trade with

China? Why not resolve any conflicts through the WTO’s dispute settlement system?

Chad Bown outlines the US’s long-standing concerns with multiple aspects of Chinese

economic policy; China’s domestic industrial and technology policies, as well as the

structure of Chinese state-sponsored capitalism, have spilled over into the US–China

trade relationship. He explains why the current US administration believes WTO dispute

settlement is not capable of resolving important points of tension in the relationship

between the two countries. In bringing to light the perceived failure of WTO dispute

settlement to satisfy US concerns – including a history of legal decisions against the

US that did not involve China – Bown helps us to understand the motivation behind

the radical decision by the US to abandon multilateral trade negotiation in favour of a

bilateral trade war. At the same time, his chapter raises an important cautionary note:

the rules-based WTO system has generated enormous benefits for the US over the past

75 years, and the consequences of discarding it could be severe.

Why would the US, the world’s largest and most significant economic power since

the end of WWII, choose to throw away a rules-based trading system that has served

its interests for decades in favour of power-based bilateral bargaining with the world’s

second largest economy? Aaditya Mattoo and Robert Staiger take up this question in

Introduction

Meredith A. Crowley

3

a chapter that argues that long-term changes in the relative positions of the US and

China in the world economy are the deep drivers behind the eruption of the US–China

trade conflict. They frame the shift in US policy as the consequence of a decline in

US hegemony over the global economy. In their view, a global hegemon will choose

to underwrite and support a rules-based multilateral system of international economic

policy cooperation that constrains its own power because the benefits of this type of

open system vastly exceed the costs for a global power. However, as the hegemon’s

power begins to be challenged by the rise of a major competitor, the advantages of a

rules-based system wane relative to the gains that can be achieved through power-based

based bilateral bargaining.

The costs of trade wars

The next four contributions quantify the economic costs of import tariffs and trade wars

and discuss the uneven distribution of losses across countries, producers, and consumers.

Ralph Ossa uses quantitative economic modelling to discuss which countries lose the

most from trade wars of different geographical scope; Doireann Fitzgerald summarises

what microeconomic studies have taught us about how firms and product-level trade

flows respond to tariff changes; and Emily Blanchard discusses new research on how

the spread and expansion of global value chains has increased the disruptive potential of

trade wars. Finally, Yi Huang, Chen Lin, Sibo Liu, and Heiwai Tang quantify the losses

to US and Chinese firms whose international global supply chains have been hit by the

trade war tariffs.

Presently, it is unclear if the US-China trade war will deepen and expand to draw in

more countries. How much damage to the world economy can the trade war inflict?

If other countries are drawn in, what size of losses should we expect? Ralph Ossa’s

chapter uses multi-country quantitative trade modelling to estimate the magnitude of

the economic welfare losses associated with trade conflicts of different scopes – from a

narrow purely bilateral US–China conflict to a worst-case scenario global trade war in

which all countries revert to tariffs of around 60%. A key insight from Ossa’s analysis

of an all-out global trade war is that the real income losses to large countries including


4

the US, the EU, and China of about -2% each are much smaller than the estimated

damage to smaller economies such as Switzerland (-14%), Mexico (-7%), and Canada

(-7%).

The aggregate effects discussed by Ossa are the cumulation of the actions of millions

of firms that sell their output in foreign countries. In the next chapter, Doireann

Fitzgerald reviews what is known about exporters’ responses to tariffs in terms of their

prices, market participation, and volume of sales. Her research on tariff liberalisations

finds that Irish firms’ prices were largely unresponsive to tariff changes while market

participation was quite sensitive. These facts provide the background for her discussion

of two recent, important studies of the immediate impact of the US–China trade war

by Amiti et al. (2019) and Fajgelbaum et al. (2019). Both studies find, somewhat

surprisingly, the complete pass-through of US tariffs to US importers. In other words,

the Chinese exporters who continued to sell their goods to the US after the tariffs were

imposed did not reduce their prices to soften the blow to their customers. The research

by Fajgelbaum et al. also finds a decline of more than 30% in US imports subject

to these new, higher tariffs. The message from these two studies is consistent with

Fitzgerald’s main findings on Irish firms facing tariff changes – a reluctance to change

prices in favour of changes in sales volumes or market participation.

However, these finding are surprising when viewed through the lens of the empirical

literature on optimal tariffs and the international macro literature on firms’ pricing

responses to exchange rate movements. The empirical literature on optimal tariffs –

that is, whether governments set higher tariffs on goods for which the cost of the tariff

can be (at least partially) shifted onto exporters – finds that tariffs are higher (Broda

et al. 2008), used more frequently (Bown and Crowley 2013), and are reduced more

in trade negotiations (Bagwell and Staiger 2011) when export supply is less elastic.

Extrapolating these previous studies to the current trade war would suggest that

exporters in at least some sectors would reduce their prices when tariffs rise. From

the international macro side, economists have long understood that price and markup

adjustments to real and policy shocks occur along the international supply chain and

throughout the distribution network (Corsetti and Dedola 2005). Recent work by

Corsetti et al. (2018) finds that Chinese exporters of highly differentiated goods adjust

their export prices and, more specifically, the destination-specific component of their

Introduction

Meredith A. Crowley

5

markups in order to absorb bilateral exchange rate movements so as to stabilise the

prices of their merchandise in the local destination market. Related work by Berman

et al. (2012) found something similar – larger, more productive French exporters

adjust their markups more than less productive exporters in response to exchange rate

movements. Altogether, these literatures suggest that, although the tariff costs of the

US-China trade war have been entirely born by US importers to date, as the trade war

persists, it is possible that export prices could begin to adjust.

The existence of global value chains (GVCs) complicates any efforts to predict which

countries and firms will suffer the greatest losses or enjoy the largest benefits from a

trade war that simultaneously raises the cost of imported inputs, reduces competitive

pressures on import-competing firms, and restricts the foreign market access of

exporters. Two contributions to this book explore how GVCs matter. Emily Blanchard

examines how the calculus of determining who wins and who loses has become more

complex under global value chains. Worryingly, her chapter suggests that because

the trade war creates incentives for firms to restructure their supply networks, the

consequences of even a short trade war could persist far into the future.

Yi Huang, Chen Lin, Sibo Liu, and Heiwai Tang use financial market data from around

the time of major announcements about the trade war to construct estimates of the costs

of the conflict to American and Chinese firms. Their chapter documents the abnormal

stock market losses of publicly listed firms on both sides of the Pacific as well as the

heterogeneity of these losses according to firms’ direct and indirect reliance on trade

with the other country. Following on from Blanchard’s discussion of the how costs of

tariffs can propagate through supply chains, they document that indirect exposure to the

trade war through supply chains led to losses for US firms feeding into exports to China

and reliant on a network that builds on imported parts from China.


6

Does the multilateral trading system have a future?

At the time of writing, it is difficult to predict the next twists and turns in the US–

China conflict, but there are signals that actions taken to date will have long-term

repercussions, even if the tariff war ends soon. In closing, we employ the insights of

economists (Simon Evenett, Johannes Fritz, Kyle Handley, and Nuno Limao) and legal

scholars (Luca Rubini and Mark Wu) to clarify the deep challenges that remain for the

world trading system.

Simon Evenett and Johannes Fritz open this part by documenting what could be called

the silent trade war – a steady increase in barriers to trade and restrictions on market

access that have been percolating throughout the trade system over the past several

years. Their analysis shows that while the hot trade war of 2018-2019 has dramatically

curtailed the market access of US exporters to China and Chinese exporters to the US,

this practice of reducing market access is part of a much longer trend.

Luca Rubini’s chapter tackles the challenges posed by government subsidies to industry.

Because the subsidy issue embodies both profound conceptual challenges, such as how

to define a subsidy, and practical issues of implementation, cooperative international

agreements to restrict government subsidisation are difficult to design and administer.

Rubini examines the controversial history of WTO jurisprudence on subsidies and

explains why this has led to a perception that the WTO’s subsidy rules no longer have

any legal bite. He wraps up on an optimistic note; a number of international working

groups have started to explore whether new rules and practices could level the playing

field.

The contribution by Kyle Handley and Nuno Limao casts a long shadow over the

hopes that wounds caused by the US–China trade war could quickly heal. Their

chapter explores the growing literature on trade policy uncertainty; empirical studies of

Portugal’s accession to the EU and China’s accession to the WTO show that permanent

declines in uncertainty over future trade policy spur growth in trade and investment. A

worrisome corollary to these positive findings is that increases in global trade policy

uncertainty, initiated by events including Britain’s decision to leave the EU and the US’

decision to raise tariffs unilaterally in violation of WTO norms, could have long-term

negative impacts on trade and investment. Indeed, a study by Crowley et al. (2018)

Introduction

Meredith A. Crowley

7

finds that tariff scares – episodes of increased uncertainty over global tariff rates on

specific products – had a chilling effect on Chinese exporters that dissuaded them from

expanding their export activity to new foreign markets. The erosion of trust between

the US and Chinese governments could lead to persistent economic losses even if a

negotiated end to the trade war is achieved; rebuilding trust among governments and

between governments and private agents will take time. Until confidence in the world

trading system to deliver stable trade policy is restored, the uncertainty costs of this

trade war will linger.

We close with Mark Wu’s analysis of the clash of economic systems at the heart of the

US–China quarrel. Wu outlines China’s unique form of state capitalism and explains how

certain aspects, such as informal networks, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence

over an individual’s career progression, and implied rather than formal requirements,

mean that attempts to seek redress for perceived unfair practices or episodes of

government subsidisation through formal legal procedures like WTO dispute settlement

are unlikely to succeed. In the absence of an effective WTO mechanism that could

put pressure on China to reform certain practices, what options remain for Western

countries? Until this question is addressed, restrictions on market access, import tariffs,

and accusations of unfair practices are unlikely to go away.

Conclusion

The essays in this volume construct a narrative of the US–China trade war as the

outgrowth of long-brewing tensions in the multilateral trading system. Multiple factors

– the unprecedented economic growth of an economy operating outside the traditional

Western capitalist model; new structures of production with supply chains spanning the

globe; geographically concentrated job losses within the US; and a multilateral trading

system that has stagnated and failed to keep pace with changes in the world economy

– have all contributed to the current mess. The current problems extend well beyond

the highly visible US–China conflict to the wider community of countries struggling

with the interface between Chinese state capitalism and their own capitalist systems,

the failure of the WTO to make progress with multilateral negotiations over almost

anything, and a dispute resolution system that has veered off track.


8

From our current vantage point, the prospects for the future of the multilateral trading

system look grim. Unfortunately, the list of potentially effective avenues for achieving

substantive reform is short and will require concerted efforts and serious compromises.

The difficult question of how to integrate the fundamentally different economic systems

of Western liberal capitalism and Chinese state capitalism has no easy answers. Yet, in

the middle of ongoing negotiations to resolve the US–China conflict, it is important

to remember that the open, liberal multilateral trading system has delivered enormous

benefits in its 75-year history – Ralph Ossa estimates the gains from trade amount

to one-quarter of world income. The question for policymakers today is whether the

multilateral trading system, which fostered tremendous economic welfare gains for so

many in the past, can be redeveloped and renewed in order to continue its legacy of

delivering economic prosperity into the future.

References

Amiti, M, M Dai, R Feenstra and J Romalis (2017), “How Did China’s WTO entry

benefit US Consumers?”, CEPR Discussion Paper 12076.

Amiti, M, S J Redding and D Weinstein (2019), “The Impact of the 2018 Trade War on

US Imports and Prices”, CEPR Discussion Paper 13564.

Autor, D H, D Dorn, K Majlesi and G H Hanson (2017), “Importing Political

Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure”, NBER Working

Paper 22637.

Bagwell, K and R W Staiger (2011), “What Do Trade Negotiators Negotiate About?

Empirical Evidence from the World Trade Organization”, American Economic Review

101(4): 1238-73.

Berman, N, P Martin and T Mayer (2012), “How Do Different Exporters React to

Exchange Rate Changes”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 127: 437-492.

Bown, C P (2019), “The US-China Trade Conflict after 40 Years of Special Protection”,

Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper 19-7.

Introduction

Meredith A. Crowley

9

Bown, C P and M A Crowley (2013), “Self-Enforcing Trade Agreements: Evidence

from Time-Varying Trade Policy”, American Economic Review 103(2): 1071-90.

Broda, C, N Limao and D E Weinstein (2008), “Optimal Tariffs and Market Power: The

Evidence”, American Economic Review 98(5): 2032-65.

Corsetti, G, M A Crowley, L Han and H Song (2018), “Markets and Markups: A New

Empirical Framework and Evidence on Exporters from China”, Cambridge-INET

Working Paper No. 2018/05.

Corsetti, G and L Dedola (2005), “A macroeconomic model of international price

discrimination”, Journal of International Economics 67(1): 129-155.

Crowley, M A, N Meng and H Song (2018), “Tariff Scares: Trade policy uncertainty

and foreign market entry by Chinese firms”, Journal of International Economics 114:

96-115.

Fajgelbaum, P D, P K Goldberg, P J Kennedy, and A Khandelwal (2019), “The Return

to Protectionism”, NBER Working Paper 25638.

About the author

Meredith A. Crowley is a Reader in International Economics at the University of

Cambridge, Fellow of St. John’s College, and a Research Coordinator at Cambridge-

INET. She is a Senior Fellow of the publicly-funded UK in a Changing Europe

(UKCE) think tank, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research

(CEPR - London), a member of the Trade and Economy Panel of the UK Department

for International Trade, and a member of the Scientific Council of Bruegel, the Brussels-

based think tank. Her research on international trade, multinational trade agreements,

and trade policy has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals including the

American Economic Review, the Canadian Journal of Economics, the European

Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of

International Economics and World Trade Review. She frequently appears in the media,

including the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times,

The Economist, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Times.


10

Prior to arriving at Cambridge in 2013, Crowley worked in the Research Department

of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Crowley has held visiting positions at

Georgetown University, the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and

Nanjing University. Her research has been presented at central banks and international

institutions around the world, including the International Monetary Fund, the World

Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

Crowley received bachelor’s degrees in Asian studies and chemistry from Bowdoin

College in Brunswick, Maine, a master of public policy degree in international trade

and finance from Harvard University, and master’s and doctorate degrees in economics

from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

13

1 The costs of US trade liberalisation with China have been acute for some workers

Justin R. Pierce and Peter K. SchottBoard of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; Yale School of Management

The past two years have seen long-simmering trade tensions between the US and China

turn to action, with the US imposing tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods and China

responding with tariffs on $60 billion of imports from the US. Understanding the

sources of these tensions is critical for determining ways in which they can be resolved,

while attempting to minimise damage to the global economy. In a series of papers, we

examine the impact of US trade liberalisation with China on US industries and regions

that experienced different levels of exposure to policy changes. Our findings suggest

that the distributional consequences of US trade liberalisation towards China – in which

negative effects like job loss were concentrated in certain industries and counties –

have contributed to trade tensions between the two countries. Furthermore, our research

indicates that the implementation of US trade liberalisation may have made its effects

more disruptive by concentrating adjustment to the rise of China in a shorter period

of time.

US trade liberalisation towards China

Our research focuses on a particular change in US trade policy towards China that

occurred in October 2000, known as the US extension of permanent normal trade

relations to China, or PNTR. PNTR differed from traditional trade liberalisations in

that it eliminated a major source of uncertainty in US–China trade relations instead of

changing the actual US tariff rates applied to Chinese goods.


14

Before PNTR, US imports from China faced the generally low import tariff rates

available to most other US trading partners that were members of the WTO. However,

because the US government classified China as a non-market economy, continued

access to those low rates required annual re-approval by the president, which could be

overturned by Congress. Approval of these annual renewals became much less certain

after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989 and remained so throughout periods of

tension between the US and China in the 1990s. Importantly, if an annual renewal were

to fail, US tariffs on most Chinese imports would have increased substantially, from 4%

to 37% for the average manufacturing industry.

PNTR eliminated the need for annual renewal of China’s access to low import tariff

rates by making China’s access to the low NTR tariff rates permanent. As a result, for

US firms, PNTR improved incentives to invest in various activities that might reduce

demand for labour in the US, including moving production to China, increasing sourcing

from Chinese producers at the expense of US producers, and adopting various sorts

of labour-saving technologies to compete with rising imports from China in terms of

quality or cost. For Chinese firms, removing tariff rate uncertainty improved incentives

to begin exporting or to invest in scaling up production to serve the US market.

The surprisingly swift decline of US manufacturing employment

In Pierce and Schott (2016), we find that the US extension of PNTR to China in late

2000 was associated with both a substantial increase in US imports from China and a

sharp drop in US manufacturing employment between 2000 and 2003. In particular,

our formal empirical analysis reveals that both the rise in imports and the decline in

employment are more substantial in industries more exposed to the reduction in tariff

rate uncertainty.

The sharp drop in US manufacturing employment after 2000 differs markedly from the

more gradual decline in manufacturing employment that occurred during the prior two

decades. Indeed, in the 21 years following the peak of US manufacturing employment

in 1979 to just before PNTR, US manufacturing employment fell by 2.3 million (or

12%). In the next four years, from 2000 to 2003, it fell by 2.9 million (or 17%) – a

The costs of US trade liberalisation with China have been acute for some workers

Justin R. Pierce and Peter K. Schott

15

decline that is roughly as large as that experienced in the four years following the onset

of the Great Recession.

The speed of the post-2000 decline may have exacerbated distributional losses

associated with PNTR. That is, to the extent that workers displaced by a change in

trade policy are able to transition quickly to employment in other sectors, their earnings

losses are likely to be more limited. But if reallocation is more difficult because a large

number of workers need to relocate simultaneously, the labour market shock may be

more disruptive. In that case, reallocation may take longer, displaced workers’ earnings

may fall more dramatically, and distributional losses may be more severe.

Another interesting question that emerges from our analysis is whether the distributional

losses in the US associated with China’s rapid growth during the 1990s and 2000s

would have been smaller if PNTR had been enacted earlier, say in the 1980s. In that

case, adjustment to the increasing importance of China as an exporter of manufactured

goods may have been smoother. Instead, uncertainty about China’s NTR status in the

1980s and 1990s likely led to pent-up demand for integration by US and Chinese firms.

That integration then occurred suddenly following passage of PNTR, likely making the

adjustment process more abrupt.

Geographic concentration of the impact of trade liberalisation

Another important dimension of the employment loss after 2000 is its uneven geographic

distribution. US counties with larger shares of employment in industries where the

elimination of tariff rate uncertainty was more binding faced larger employment losses.

Exposure to PNTR varied substantially across the US, and was particularly high in the

southeast. As with the rapidity of the employment decline, this spatial concentration

may have magnified distributional losses by making it harder for workers located in the

most exposed areas to find alternate employment in a nearby county.

A growing body of research finds that those regions that were more exposed to import

competition have experienced negative outcomes beyond employment. Autor et al.

(2013), for example, show that regions experiencing greater import competition from

China exhibit declining labour force participation as well as increased take-up of


16

social welfare benefits such as disability. Other researchers have found links between

exposure to Chinese imports and relative increases in crime (Che and Xu 2015), relative

increases in household debt (Barrot et al. 2016), relative declines in the provision of

public goods (Feler and Senses 2016) and relative declines in marriage rates (Autor et

al. 2018).

These consequences also carry over to health. An influential recent paper by Case and

Deaton (2015), for example, documents a striking increase in ‘deaths of despair’ – from

suicide, drug poisonings or alcohol-related liver disease – among middle-aged whites in

the US. In our own research (Pierce and Schott 2018), we find that counties’ exposure

to PNTR is associated with long-lasting relative increases in these deaths of despair

– especially from drug overdoses – and that these increases are concentrated among

working-age whites, especially white males.

Moving foward

Although our research has focused on the distributional consequences of trade,

particularly for industries and regions more exposed to import competition, it is

important to keep in mind that trade liberalisation with China has been found to benefit

the US as a whole (Amiti et al. 2017, Handley and Limao 2017). Some of these benefits

occur as the US economy’s resources are reallocated toward comparative advantage

sectors. Fort et al. (2018), for example, show that over the long term, firms have

increased employment in their non-manufacturing establishments even as they shrink

manufacturing employment. Within the manufacturing sector, real value added has

continued to increase over time, despite declining employment, indicating a substantial

increase in aggregate labour productivity.

Nonetheless, the research described above highlights the importance of considering

the distributional effects of trade, along with its broader benefits. Understanding how

those most exposed to trade competition are affected is important in its own right,

but also because failure to address the distributional consequences of trade can erode

support for welfare-augmenting trade policies. Indeed, Feigenbaum and Hall (2015),

Che et al. (2017), and Autor et al. (2017) have found that areas experiencing increases

in import competition have exhibited anti-trade responses in voting by individuals and

legislators, along with increased political polarisation.



17

A challenge for policymakers, of course, is to determine how the benefits of international

trade can be broadly shared throughout the economy. Though it is common for trade

economists to promote education as the solution to this problem, development of

appropriate policy responses along this line is hampered by a lack of research into the

specific frictions workers face in moving between industries and regions. An apparel

worker displaced by trade liberalisation in the southeastern US, for example, might

have sought employment in the growing oil and gas industry in Wyoming, but the data

suggest that such movements are relatively rare. Is this lack of movement due to an

information asymmetry, i.e. workers in the southeast do not know of job opportunities

in other industries in other parts of the country? Or do displaced workers in the southeast

know about these opportunities, but face credit constraints hampering their ability to

finance a move or to acquire the skills needed to make the transition?

Finding answers to these questions is particularly important given that labour market

shocks can come not only from trade, but also from the adoption of labour-saving

technologies such as industrial robots. Investing in research now to learn more about

how to address these types of shocks should be an important goal for both economists

and policymakers.

References

Amiti, M, M Dai, R C Feenstra and J Romalis (2017), “How Did China’s WTO Entry

Benefit U.S. Consumers?”, NBER Working Paper 23487.

Autor, D H, D Dorn and G H Hanson (2013), “The China Syndrome: Local Labor

Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States”, American Economic

Review 103(6): 2121-2168.

Autor, D H, D Dorn, K Majlesi and G H Hanson (2017), “Importing Political

Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure”, NBER Working

Paper 22637.

Autor, D H, D Dorn and G H Hanson (2018), “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing

Decline and the Falling Marriage-Market Value of Men”, American Economic Review:

Insights (forthcoming).


18

Barrot, J-N, E Loualiche, M Plosser and J Sauvagnat (2016), “Import Competition and

Household Debt”, mimeo, MIT Sloan.

Case, A and A Deaton (2015), “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among

White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century”, Proceedings of the National

Academy of Sciences 112(49): 15078-15083.

Che, Y and X Xu (2015), “The China Syndrome in US: Import Competition, Crime,

and Government Transfer”, mimeo, University of Munich.

Che, Y, Y Lu, J R Pierce, P Schott and Z Tao (2017), “Did Trade Liberalization Influence

U.S. Elections?”, NBER Working Paper 22178.

Feigenbaum, J J and A B Hall (2015), “How Legislators Respond to Localized

Economic Shocks: Evidence from Chinese Import Competition”, Journal of Politics

77(4): 1012-1030.

Feler, L and M Z Senses (2017), “Trade Shocks and the Provision of Local Public

Goods”, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 9(4): 101-143.

Fort, T C, J R Pierce and P K Schott (2018), “New Perspectives on the Decline of U.S.

Manufacturing Employment”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 32(2): 47-72.

Handley, K and N Limao (2017), “Policy Uncertainty, Trade and Welfare: Evidence

from the U.S. and China”, American Economic Review 107(9): 2731-2783.

Pierce, J R and P K Schott (2016), “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing

Employment”, American Economic Review 106(7): 1632-1662.

Pierce, J R and P K Schott (2018), “Trade Liberalization and Mortality: Evidence from

U.S. Counties”, American Economic Review: Insights (forthcoming).



19

About the authors

Justin R. Pierce is a Principal Economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal

Reserve System. His research focuses on the implications of international trade for US

firms and regions. His work has been published in academic journals including the

American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and the Journal

of International Economics. Prior to beginning his graduate studies, he worked in the

private sector advising domestic and foreign firms regarding antidumping and safeguard

investigations. He holds a PhD in Economics from Georgetown University.

Peter K. Schott is Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management, Research

Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Special-Sworn-Status

researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau. His research focuses on how countries, firms and

workers react to globalization. Recent papers examine the decline of U.S. manufacturing

employment after China joined the WTO, the misallocation of quota licenses by the

Chinese government under the global Multi-Fiber Arrangement, and how to measure

changes in countries’ export quality over time. His research has appeared in various

academic and other outlets, including The New Yorker, The Economist, The New York

Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review. Before joining Yale’s

faculty, he worked as a commercial banker for Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co., Ltd. in

New York and Los Angeles and received a Master’s degree in Political Science and a

PhD in Management from UCLA.

21

2 The 2018 trade war and the end of dispute settlement as we knew it

Chad P. Bown1

Peterson Institute for International Economics and CEPR

Future scholars may someday ask: Did the 2018 trade war cause the end of dispute

settlement under the WTO? Or was it the failures of dispute settlement that caused the

trade war?

For more than 20 years, the WTO’s dispute settlement system provided an orderly

process for countries to resolve trade grievances and keep cooperation going.2 But in

2018, something broke down.

In this chapter I explore why the inability to resolve underlying problems with the WTO

itself deserves some of the blame. The main goal is to arrive at some potential lessons

for a future system of dispute settlement.

The US deliberately pushed the WTO to the brink

Before turning to a critique of the WTO, I begin with the conventional wisdom. The US

provoked a crisis in 2018 with three precisely targeted policy decisions that expertly

poked holes in some of the WTO’s weakest spots.

1 Thanks to Bernard Hoekman, Petros Mavroidis, Robert Staiger, and Mark Wu for comments. All remaining errors are my

own.

2 Mavroidis (2016) explains the WTO dispute settlement process. Economic surveys of dispute settlement include Park

(2016) as well as Bagwell et al. (2016: 1206-1218).


22

First, it imposed new tariffs – which it claimed would not be subject to international

review – on nearly $50 billion of steel and aluminium imports. Formally, the US

excused its new tariffs by triggering the WTO’s national security exception. The

US administration has argued this exception is “self-judging” or “non-justiciable”,

meaning that it cannot be questioned or benchmarked against externally verifiable

economic evidence, unlike other opt-outs like antidumping or safeguards.3 But denying

any outside check could lead to copycat behaviour and a protectionist spiral in which

countries ignore even the most basic rules that limit tariffs. The result could be systemic

failure.

Second, the US retaliated against another WTO member without first going through

the formal dispute resolution process. Its tariffs on $250 billion of imports from China

came after completing only an internal investigation. WTO rules require a country

first win a dispute that requests the partner change its policies. The US could only be

authorised to retaliate if China then refused to comply, and even then, the retaliation

would be subject to WTO limits.

Third, the US initiated a procedure that could end the WTO’s system of resolving

disputes. Countries currently have the right to appeal to the WTO’s standing Appellate

Body (AB) if they disagree with a preliminary ruling. But the United States has refused

to allow the appointment of new AB members as old members’ terms expire. By

December 2019, the AB may not have enough members to issue rulings to appeals.4

But if no rulings are issuable, a forward-looking defendant country could simply trigger

an appeal, put the legal case into permanent limbo, and eliminate the WTO’s ability to

authorise tariff retaliation against countries that fail to comply.

3 For a discussion of the historical origins of the national security exception, see Pinchis-Paulsen (2019) and Bown and

Keynes (2019).

4 While the Trump administration has created a crisis by blocking all appointments, the Obama administration had already

signalled discontent with the AB by blocking specific nominees and relying on some of the arguments below.

The 2018 trade war and the end of dispute settlement as we knew it

Chad P. Bown

23

Scholars have articulated the extraordinary economic and long-run institutional costs

of these and other US policy actions taken in 2017-2018.5 Those costs are of first-order

importance but will not be repeated here.

Instead, the next sections explore the political-economic concerns with the WTO that

may have contributed to these US actions.

China’s subsidies demanded US intervention of some form

The US imposed national security tariffs in part because of China’s state-driven

economic model. In sectors like steel and aluminium, for example, China’s expansion

increased from under 20% to over 50% of global production between 2002 and 2017.

Yet, even as China’s domestic demand began to slow, production and its already

formidable exports continued to increase.

China’s subsidies and exports exacerbated three external concerns. Its potential global

domination was worrisome on anti-competitiveness grounds because of its history of

abusing international market power once acquired.6 Furthermore, US policymakers

have become more sensitive to the fact that technology- and trade-induced shocks

impose larger-than-expected adjustment costs on domestic communities and labour

markets, and that the Chinese system may push ‘its share’ of those costs onto others

(Autor et al. 2016).7 Finally, China got caught in US domestic politics. Steel and

aluminium firms are geographically concentrated in American swing states, and US

policymakers are historically responsive to their economic interests. And the industries’

5 This includes the author elsewhere (see, for example, the collection in Bown and Kolb 2019). Fajgelbaum et al. (2019) and

Amiti et al. (2019) provide model-based estimates of the economic costs of the 2018 tariffs. The Trump administration’s

focus on trade deficits seems to drive its view that trade agreements have been unfair to the US. Finally, other costly

US trade policies in 2017-2018 include withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, renegotiation of the

Korea-US and North American Free Trade Agreements, and its potential new trade restrictions on automobiles.

6 The US and other countries won two WTO disputes over China’s illegal export restrictions on raw materials and rare

earth metals that had constrained foreign access to critical inputs used in advanced manufacturing.

7 Of course, US spending on active labour market policies – a more efficient approach to facilitating adjustment – is also

low relative to peer countries (Bown and Freund 2019).


24

older, mostly male workers may be part of the other recent US narrative over identity

politics (Grossman and Helpman 2018).

US national security tariffs arose because others wouldn’t work or had been ruled illegal by the WTO

Other US policy options had been taken off the table for a combination of reasons.

The US had already emptied some of the WTO toolbox, but to little economic effect.

Its use of antidumping tariffs had mostly stopped steel and aluminium imports directly

entering from China. But China’s exports to third countries continued to rise – as did

US imports from third countries – likely due to trade diversion and potentially trade

deflection.

But second, the US was unwilling to deploy a nondiscriminatory safeguard tariff –

instead of a national security tariff – because earlier attempts had been thwarted by

the WTO itself. The AB issued a series of legal rulings condemning US safeguards

imposed over 1995-2003, including a 2002 US safeguard on steel.8

The US was also concerned a WTO dispute was too risky and potentially unwinnable

The US ruled out a formal dispute to stop Chinese subsidies, the first-best result, out of

concern that the WTO was not well-equipped to constrain Chinese-style subsidisation.9

WTO subsidy disciplines can easily capture transparent, direct payments from a

8 While the US imposed safeguards on solar panels and washing machines in 2018, indicating the constraint was

nonbinding, the US government was forced to act because those cases were initiated by domestic industry. The last time

the US government self-initiated a safeguard investigation was 2002, which resulted in the steel tariffs rebuked by the

AB (Sykes 2003).

9 The Obama administration filed a WTO dispute against China’s aluminium subsidies at the very end of 2016 that the

Trump administration decided not to pursue. The US had pushed for a multilateral, OECD forum to address global

(Chinese) steel overcapacity, but that also made little progress. A final argument against formal dispute settlement is the

length of the process. Horn et al. (2011) find that, on average, three years elapse between the initiation of the dispute, the

issuances of the panel and Appellate Body report, and the outcome.


Chad P. Bown

25

government agency to firms. But Chinese subsidies are different and often stem from a

nuanced and complex combination of policies.

A recent OECD (2019) study of the downstream (finished) aluminium industry is

illustrative. Its first key point is that primary aluminium is estimated to make up 75-

86% of the cost of downstream products, and primary aluminium has benefited from

highly subsidised Chinese coal. But second, China also imposed export restrictions on

primary aluminium, implicitly subsidising Chinese downstream firms relative to their

foreign competitors. China also rebated value-added taxes to exporters of downstream

products without doing the same to primary producers.

The combined result was a heavily subsidised downstream, refined aluminium industry.

But it is also one that the WTO legal system would have found challenging to address.10

The US imposed unilateral tariffs because that type of WTO dispute was also unwinnable

The idea that WTO dispute settlement was not well-positioned to tackle a suite of

Chinese policies whose economic effect was to act against the spirit – if not the legal

letter – of WTO rules applies similarly to the US unilateral tariffs on $250 billion of

imports.

The US economic argument was that China maintained high tariffs – for example,

on automobiles – that contributed to foreign firms needing to access the Chinese

market through foreign direct investment in lieu of exports. But investment, combined

with China’s joint venture requirements and other regulatory barriers, created greater

possibilities for the forcible transfer of foreign technology, industrial espionage, and

theft of intellectual property (USTR 2018). Again, because it was a combination of

Chinese policies – some, such as high-Chinese tariffs, that were not WTO-inconsistent

when viewed in isolation – a WTO dispute seemed unable to solve the problem (see

also Wu 2016).

10 In a related dispute, Crowley and Hillman (2018) discuss how the AB found against the EU’s anti-subsidy tariffs despite

Argentine export restrictions for soybeans resulting in a subsidy to Argentina’s downstream, processed soybean products.


26

However, one important counter-argument – and that the US gave up on formal

dispute settlement prematurely – is that it failed to appeal to the WTO’s non-violation

nullification and impairment (NVNI) clause (Staiger and Sykes 2013). Loosely

interpreted, NVNI is a legal provision by which the WTO could find China guilty of

harming US trading interests even without having broken any explicit WTO rules.

Nevertheless, there have been few attempts to use such an argument. With respect to

China, it would also require that the AB grapple with economic models in order to

assess how complex policy interactions taking place in a non-market economy adversely

impact US economic activity. It is not as straightforward as asking the AB whether one

Chinese policy crossed some red line.

It also would have been philosophically inconsistent for the US to ask the WTO to

find another country guilty even though it hadn’t broken any explicit rules. The current

US administration has argued repeatedly against any WTO attempts to encroach on

national sovereignty.

The Appellate Body needs a reboot because it had gone astray

Much of the US action that could eliminate the Appellate Body was based on the

concern that the WTO has engaged in judicial overreach. The argument is that the AB

imposed obligations on the US and other countries that had never been agreed through

70 years of GATT or WTO negotiations.11

As noted, one example involved a series of rulings against US use of safeguards. In

another backward-looking example, the US became frustrated that it lost dozens of

WTO decisions over ‘zeroing’, or an approach to calculating antidumping tariffs. It has

argued these rulings overly constrained the US ability to address unfair trade (Bown

and Prusa 2011).

11 Payosova et al. (2018) describe these and other procedural concerns with the dispute settlement process. Maggi and

Staiger (2011) examine the issue of judicial overreach by modelling WTO dispute settlement as potentially completing

an incomplete contract.


Chad P. Bown

27

Other, forward-looking US worries involve China. In ongoing cases over China’s non-

market economy status, the AB could further limit how the US deploys its antidumping

tariffs. In other disputes, the AB may decide that Chinese state-owned firms are not a

‘public body’ and thus do not count as being a subsidy provider, limiting US use of

countervailing duties.

The US view is that it was the AB’s own rulings that created the need for someone to step

in. And the problems couldn’t be fixed without a crisis, because with the Doha Round

of negotiations stuck, the WTO lacks a rules-making function to legislate corrections

when the AB either makes a legal error or crosses a politically sensitive red line.

To make its point, the US did two things. It imposed policies (national security tariffs

and tariffs on China) that were even more problematic than the ones ruled illegal in the

past. It also threatened the existence of the WTO dispute settlement system that had

decided that those earlier policies were illegal.

Dispute settlement may be going back to the GATT

Dispute settlement was not always this legalistic. Under the General Agreement on

Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the WTO’s predecessor from 1947-1994, disputes were

typically resolved quite differently.

The key GATT distinction was that countries could veto the dispute at any stage. This

included a veto from the defendant before the dispute began or right before adoption of a

legal ruling. Because the resulting legal process was uncertain, disputes were addressed

through negotiation or not at all. And it was also a system that benefited those with

power. As the current US Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer, has expressed an

affinity for the GATT system (Lighthizer 2017), that may be where things are headed.

Ironically it was the US that became increasingly frustrated with the GATT’s

ineffectiveness in the 1980s. It turned to the “aggressively unilateral” Section 301

– the same law used to impose tariffs on China in 2018 – and demanded partners

provide additional access for US exporters or face tariffs. Growing concerns with US

unilateralism at the time helped lead to the Uruguay Round agreement and the creation


28

of the WTO dispute settlement system.12 And over the ensuring 25 years, no countries

could block the process of dispute resolution, and the WTO could authorise retaliation

if countries were found not to comply with the rules. And critically important, it was

rare for a dispute to ever reach the stage of retaliation before being resolved.

The other main problem with the GATT is that there was a lot more protectionism,

much of it through “voluntary” export restraints (Hoekman and Kostecki 2009, Bown

2019). And while no major trade wars may have erupted, the GATT was never forced

to confront today’s trade tensions between market-oriented and state-driven economies.

WTO dispute settlement is not gone yet, nor is the 2018 trade war. But if either goes,

any evaluation of the effectiveness of the US strategy will also require a thorough

assessment of the new dispute settlement system that replaces it. And that will require

grappling with what the WTO system provided, warts and all.

References

Amiti, M, S J Redding and D Weinstein (2019), “The Impact of the 2018 Trade War on

US Imports and Prices”, CEPR Discussion Paper 13564.

Autor, D H, D Dorn and G H Hanson (2016), “The China Shock: Learning from Labor

Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade”, Annual Review of Economics 8(1):

205-240.

Bagwell, K, C P Bown and R W Staiger (2016), “Is the WTO Passé?”, Journal of

Economic Literature 54(4): 1125-1231.

Bown, C P (2019), “US Special Protection in Historical Perspective: 1974-2018”,

Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper, forthcoming.

Bown, C P and C Freund (2019), “Active Labor Market Policies: Lessons from Other

Countries for the United States”, Peterson Institute for International Economics

Working Paper 19-2, January.

12 Mavroidis (2016) provides a discussion


Chad P. Bown

29

Bown, C P and S Keynes (2019), “National Security and Trade – The Fear of Imitation”,

Trade Talks, Episode 81, 18 April.

Bown, C P and M Kolb (2019), “Trump’s Trade War Timeline: An Up-to-Date Guide”,

Peterson Institute for International Economics blog (last updated 24 February).

Bown, C P and T J Prusa (2011), “US Antidumping: Much Ado About Zeroing”, in W

J Martin and A Mattoo (eds), Unfinished Business? The WTO’s Doha Agenda, CEPR

and World Bank, pp. 355-392.

Crowley, M A and J Hillman (2018), “Slamming the Door on Trade Policy Discretion?

The WTO Appellate Body’s Ruling on Market Distortions and Production Costs in

EU–Biodiesel (Argentina)”, World Trade Review 17(2): 195-213.

Dean, J M (1995), “Market Disruption and the Incidence of VERs under the MFA”, The

Review of Economics and Statistics 77(2): 383-388.

Fajgelbaum, P D, P K Goldberg, P J Kennedy, and A K Khandelwal (2019), “The

Return to Protectionism”, NBER Working Paper 25638.

Grossman, G M and E Helpman (2018), “Identity Politics and Trade Policy”, NBER

Working Paper 25348.

Hoekman, B M and M M Kostecki (2009), The Political Economy of the World Trading

System, Oxford University Press.

Horn, H, L Johannesson and P C Mavroidis (2011), “The WTO Dispute Settlement

System 1995-2006: Some Descriptive Statistics”, Journal of World Trade 45(6): 1107-

1138.

Lighthizer, R (2017), Remarks at CSIS Event on US Trade Policy Priorities, 18

September.

Maggi, G and R W Staiger (2011), “The Role of Dispute Settlement Procedures in

International Trade Agreements”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 126: 475-515.

https://piie.com/blogs/trade-investment-policy-watch/trump-trade-war-china-date-guide

https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-trade-policy-priorities-robert-lighthizer-united-states-trade-representative


30

Mavroidis, P C (2016), “Dispute Settlement in the WTO: Mind over Matter”, in K

Bagwell and R W Staiger (eds), The Handbook of Commercial Policy, Vol. 1A, Elsevier,

North Holland.

OECD (2019), “Measuring distortions in international markets: the aluminium value

chain”, OECD Trade Policy Paper No. 218.

Payosova, T, G C Hufbauer and J J Schott (2018), “The Dispute Settlement Crisis in

the World Trade Organization: Causes and Cures”, Peterson Institute for International

Economics Policy Brief 18-5.

Park, J-H (2016), “Enforcement and Dispute Settlement”, in K Bagwell and R W

Staiger (eds), The Handbook of Commercial Policy, Vol. 1A, Elsevier, North Holland.

Pinchis-Paulsen, M (2019), “Trade Multilateralism and National Security: Antinomies

in the History of the International Trade Organization”, NYU Working Paper, March.

Staiger, R W and A O Sykes (2013), “Non-Violations”, Journal of International

Economic Law 16(4): 741–775.

Sykes, A O (2003), “The safeguards mess: a critique of WTO jurisprudence”, World

Trade Review 2(3): 261-295.

USTR (2018), Findings of the Investigation into China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices

Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation Under Section

301 of the Trade Act of 1974, 22 March.

Wu, M (2016), “The ‘China, Inc.’ Challenge to Global Trade Governance”, Harvard

International Law Journal 57(2): 261–24.

About the author

Chad P. Bown is Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for

International Economics in Washington and a Research Fellow at CEPR in London.

With Soumaya Keynes, he co-hosts Trade Talks, a weekly podcast on the economics

of international trade policy. Bown has served as Senior Economist in the White

House on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), and he is formerly


Chad P. Bown

31

a tenured Professor of Economics at Brandeis University, where he was a member of

the faculty for twelve years with a joint appointment in the Department of Economics

and International Business School (IBS). Bown spent a year in residence as a Visiting

Scholar in Economic Research at the WTO Secretariat in Geneva, and he most recently

has been a Lead Economist at the World Bank conducting research and advising

developing country governments on trade policy.

33

3 Understanding trade wars

Aaditya Mattoo and Robert W. Staiger1

World Bank; Dartmouth College

A popular view among economists is that recent US trade actions defy economic logic,

because these actions seem to link gains from trade to bilateral trade imbalances and

treat trade as a zero-sum game. According to this view, these actions are undesirable

because they will lead to higher tariffs; that could happen either by design or, if the

tariffs are a ploy to induce liberalisation abroad, because the ploy will fail and the

higher ‘bargaining tariffs’ will remain. And it follows from this view that, in the event

that the trade wars do lead to negotiated outcomes that result in more open markets,

these tactics must be regarded as a success.

We describe here an interpretation of current US trade actions that is at once more

charitable and less forgiving.2 More charitable, because according to our interpretation

it is possible to see a logic to these actions: the US is initiating a change from ‘rules-

based’ to ‘power-based’ tariff bargaining and is selecting countries with which it runs

bilateral trade deficits as suitable targets of its bargaining tariffs. Less forgiving, because

the costs of these trade tactics cannot be avoided even if they happen to deliver lower

tariffs. Rather the main costs will arise from the use of the tactics themselves, and from

the damage done to the rules-based multilateral trading system.

1 Thanks to Treb Allen, Emily Blanchard, Chad Bown, Davin Chor, Swati Dhingra, Caroline Freund, Penny Goldberg,

Judy Goldstein, Henrik Horn, Doug Irwin, Petros C. Mavroidis, Emanuel Ornelas, Nina Pavcnik, Alan Sykes, Nick

Tsivanidis and Ben Zissimos for many helpful comments. All remaining errors are our own. The views expressed in this

chapter are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the institutions to which they belong. Research for this

chapter has been supported in part by the World Bank’s Umbrella Facility for Trade.

2 In Mattoo and Staiger (2019), we develop this interpretation more fully.


34

Trade wars and the rules-based multilateral trading system

The most-favoured nation (MFN) principle and reciprocity are two pillars of the

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/WTO rules-based multilateral trading

system. MFN embodies the nondiscrimination principle: imports of the same product

from different countries have the right to face the same (MFN) treatment in a given

market. Reciprocity refers to the notion that bargains should be balanced: due to the

agreed tariff liberalisation, each country can anticipate an increase in the volume of its

exports that is roughly equivalent in value to the increase in the volume of its imports.

These rules constrain the exercise of power in tariff bargaining (Jackson 1989). MFN

dilutes the ability of a powerful country to capture the gains from pressuring bargaining

partners to lower their tariffs, because any gains will be shared as well by third-country

exporters. And reciprocity serves to further neutralise the exercise of power in tariff

bargains, because it establishes an expectation of balanced terms for the bargain.3

Recent US trade actions can be seen as an attempt to escape from these constraints, an

attempt that is made clear in the following statement by Wilbur Ross, US Secretary of

Commerce:

An ideal global trading system would facilitate adoption of the lowest possible

level of tariffs. In this ideal system, countries with the lowest tariffs would apply

reciprocal tariffs to those with the highest and then automatically lower that

reciprocal tariff as the other country lowers theirs. This leveling technique could

be applied product by product or across the board on an aggregated basis. Such a

modification would motivate high-tariff countries to reduce their tariffs on imports.

(Ross 2017)

The system envisaged by Secretary Ross would abandon MFN and introduce an

unprecedented notion of reciprocity – in tariff levels rather than in negotiated tariff

changes. It would repeal the rules-based multilateral trading system and replace it with

3 Bagwell and Staiger (1999) show that when applied together and strictly enforced, MFN and reciprocity can induce

bargaining outcomes that are completely independent of the relative bargaining power of the negotiating parties.

Understanding trade wars

Aaditya Mattoo and Robert W. Staiger

35

something more like a power-based system where countries are no longer constrained

by the old agreed-upon rules of behaviour.

The meaning of recent US trade actions: Bargaining tariffs

We interpret recent US trade actions as reflecting a strategy of bargaining tariffs,

whereby US tariffs are increased above the levels to which the US has committed in

existing trade agreements with the goal of inducing US trading partners to reduce their

tariffs. That raises the question of why bargaining tariffs are needed to achieve this goal,

when they were not needed to bring bargaining partners to the table over the past 70

years of successful GATT/WTO liberalisation. We suggest two answers.

First, the threat of bargaining tariffs is needed to spur MFN negotiations between

the US and other industrialised countries such as Japan and the EU (and preferential

tariff bargaining with countries such as Canada, Mexico, and South Korea), because

reciprocal tariff bargaining has largely run its course with these countries and most of

the positive-sum gains from reciprocal tariff liberalisation have already been achieved

by earlier trade agreements. Given this, any further tariff negotiation beyond the tariff

commitments already made in those agreements amounts to a reallocation among

countries of the existing spoils from globalisation – in effect, a zero-sum game. And the

threat of bargaining tariffs is needed to induce a (zero-sum) reallocation of these spoils.

Second, large developing countries such as Brazil, China, and India were mostly inactive

during earlier episodes of reciprocal liberalisation but have now grown to a size where

their markets and protection matters. This has created a ‘latecomer’s problem’: positive-

sum gains from reciprocal tariff liberalisation are likely available for these countries,

but industrialised countries now have low levels of protection and little to offer these

countries in reciprocal bargains. Here again, given existing US tariff commitments, the

threat of bargaining tariffs is needed to induce these countries to reduce their tariffs.4

4 Bagwell and Staiger (2014) define the latecomer’s problem. They also describe a possible approach under which GATT

Article XXVIII renegotiations could be used in the context of the Doha Round to achieve bargaining tariffs against

latecomers while maintaining MFN and reciprocity. The difference is that the approach to the latecomer’s problem that

they describe would stay within the rules-based system and hence not allow the exercise of US bargaining power. Beyond

the latecomer’s problem, there are also unique trade policy issues raised by the nature of China’s economy.


36

But why choose as targets of its bargaining tariffs countries with which the US runs

large bilateral trade deficits? A possible reason is that US bargaining tariffs can succeed

in rebalancing the terms of existing trade agreements in favour of the US only if its

bargaining partners cannot muster as strong a tariff threat of their own. Bilateral trade

imbalances can serve as a possible metric for identifying ‘weaker’ countries where US

bargaining tariffs could have the intended effect.

Hence, rather than interpreting recent US trade actions as reflecting the view that (i)

trade is a zero-sum game, and that (ii) bilateral trade deficits signify trading partners

with whom the US loses from trade, we can interpret these actions as arising from a

view that (i) negotiating further trade agreements is a zero-sum game (or subject to the

latecomer’s problem), and that (ii) bilateral trade deficits signify trading partners with

whom US bargaining tariffs create the strongest threat point.

Hegemonic transition: The fall (and rise) of the rules-based multilateral system

Above we have argued that the US is initiating a change from rules-based to power-

based tariff bargaining. But why is this transition happening now? In 1947, the US

was the unquestioned hegemon of the world economy and played a central role in

the creation of the GATT (Irwin et al. 2011). Below we describe how it can be in the

enlightened self-interest of a sufficiently dominant hegemon to provide support for a

rules-based system that limits its ability to exercise power; but as the dominance of the

hegemon wanes, this support can erode, precipitating the collapse of the rules-based

system until another sufficiently dominant hegemon rises to take its place.

Imagine a hypothetical four-stage hegemonic transition between two countries, which

for purposes of illustration we refer to as the US and China. This transition begins with a

phase of US hegemony, after which relatively faster growth in China causes the relative

power positions of the two countries to evolve through a phase of US dominance, then

Chinese dominance, and finally to Chinese hegemony.

To understand the equilibrium regime under US hegemony (and, by symmetry, in

Chinese hegemony), recall from earlier that a commitment to MFN and reciprocity

dilutes the exercise of power. Of course, this commitment benefits the weak, but



37

paradoxically it can also be valuable for powerful countries when they are at their most

powerful. This is because as hegemons, such countries need to find some way to commit

not to exploit the weak ex post, once the bargaining has begun and the latter are trapped

by relationship-specific sunk costs or become vulnerable to exclusion from trade deals

between the hegemon and other weak countries. Absent such a commitment, the weak

might simply stay away from the bargaining table, depriving the strong of any gains

from trade bargaining. By restraining the strong, the rules-based system encourages

participation of a broader set of countries in the global economy, benefiting the weak

and the most powerful countries alike (Bagwell and Staiger 1999, Bagwell et al. 2018,

Goldstein and Gowa 2002, McLaren 1997).

Therefore, in the US hegemony phase, the US chooses to tie its hands in a rules-based

regime in order to ensure the participation of the weak (China before its rapid growth

phase). During the US dominance phase, China would like to continue to threaten not to

bargain with the US in the absence of rules, but unlike in the US hegemony phase this

threat is not credible, and hence the US does not need to rely on rules to induce China’s

participation. For this reason, in the US dominance phase the US does better in a power-

based regime than a rules-based regime and chooses to escape from its constraints.

The remaining phases are then mirror images of the first two phases just described. In

the Chinese dominance phase, China now does better in a power-based regime than a

rules-based regime and chooses not to support a rules-based regime. And finally, in the

Chinese hegemony phase, China chooses to tie its hands in a rules-based regime.

The duration of the phases will depend on the policy choices of the countries to the

extent that those policy choices determine their relative growth rates. Suggestive of the

pro-active industrial policies adopted under the China 2025 programme, China clearly

has an incentive to accelerate the transition from US dominance to Chinese dominance.

By the same logic, the US has an incentive to prevent, or at least delay, the transition,

suggesting an added rationale for the trade and investment restrictions it is imposing

on China.


38

The cost of trade wars: Losing the benefits of the rules-based system

The rationale provided in the previous two sections for recent US trade actions relies on

a myopic logic, even from a purely US perspective. Apart from MFN and reciprocity,

reputation and norms of cooperation also matter in the rules-based system. The recent

US trade actions have adversely affected these features and may cause irreversible

damage to the system in a way that would also hurt longer-term US interests.

Above, we focused on the possibility that a country would deviate from a prior

agreement and use bargaining tariffs against a ‘weaker’ trading partner with which it

runs a bilateral trade deficit. But it may then become acceptable for its other bargaining

partners to resort to the same strategy. And if this happens, any initial bargaining

advantage the country enjoys from being the first to exploit this strategy would quickly

disappear. In fact, it may be hard to maintain any cooperation at all because of the

multilateral enforcement issues that arise in this setting (Maggi 1999).

The hegemonic transition described in the previous section assumed that China’s

optimal actions when it becomes the hegemon were completely independent of US

actions today. But by breaking rules today, the US could damage the reputation of

the multilateral trading system and hence deprive a future hegemon of a commitment

mechanism. The resulting period of Chinese hegemony without the benefit of an

effective rules-based system could be costly for the US.

Undermining the central WTO rules could be costly in other ways. MFN and reciprocity

can mitigate both the strategic behaviour and the bargaining frictions that can accompany

such behaviour (Curzon 1966, Schwartz and Sykes 1997, Bagwell and Staiger 2005,

2010, 2016, 2018, Bagwell et al. 2018, 2019). By contrast, there is ample historical

evidence that the use of bargaining tariffs leads to outcomes far away from those that

might be considered desirable or efficient. The disappointing European experience with

bargaining tariffs during the second half of the 19th century has been documented by

Wallace (1933: 630).



39

Conclusion: The enlightened self-interest of a declining hegemon

The US may be resorting to bargaining tariffs to extract more of the gains from

cooperation with other relatively open industrial countries, and to induce greater

liberalisation in relatively protected large developing countries. In parallel, the declining

relative importance of the US in the world economy may have diminished the need to

reassure trading partners by committing to a rules-based system, and increased the

incentive to delay hegemonic transition.

However, a less myopic view would dictate greater US restraint. If other countries

follow the example of the US, then the US will likely lose any benefits from its actions,

and multilateral trade cooperation will collapse. If US actions durably damage the

rules-based system, the US may ultimately be hurt by the absence of restraints on the

actions of a future hegemon.

The US may also be better off with rules-based trade bargaining in the period of Chinese

hegemony than with power-based trade bargaining in the period of Chinese dominance.

This has a surprising implication: if the transition from US to Chinese dominance

cannot be avoided, then the US might be better off facilitating China’s rise, through

the phase of Chinese dominance and to the phase of Chinese hegemony. This course

of action could reflect the enlightened self-interest of the US while at the same time

averting the conflicts that have tended to arise between incumbent and rising powers.

References

Bagwell, K and R W Stagier (1999), “An Economic Theory of GATT”, American

Economic Review 89(1): 215-248.

Bagwell, K and R W Staiger (2005), “Multilateral Trade Negotiations, Bilateral

Opportunism and the Rules of GATT/WTO”, Journal of International Economics

67(2): 268-94.

Bagwell, K and R W Staiger (2010), “Backward Stealing and Forward Manipulation in

the WTO”, Journal of International Economics 82(1): 49-62.


40

Bagwell, K and R W Staiger (2014), “Can the Doha Round be a Development Round?

Setting a Place at the Table”, in R C Feenstra and A M Taylor (eds), Globalization

in an Age of Crisis: Multilateral Economic Cooperation in the Twenty-First Century,

University of Chicago Press.

Bagwell, K and R W Staiger (2016), “The Design of Trade Agreements”, Chapter 8 in

K Bagwell and R W Staiger (eds) Handbook of Commercial Policy, Elsevier.

Bagwell, K and R W Staiger (2018), “Multilateral Trade Bargaining and Dominant

Strategies”, International Economic Review 59(4): 1785-1824.

Bagwell, K, R W Staiger and A Yurukoglu (2018), “Quantitative Analysis of Multi-

Party Tariff Negotiations”, NBER working paper 24273.

Bagwell, K, R W Stagier and A Yurukoglu (2019 ), “Multilateral Trade Bargaining: A

First Look at the GATT Bargaining Records”.

Curzon, G (1966), Multilateral Commercial Diplomacy: The General Agreement on

Tariffs and Trade and its Impact on National Commercial Policies and Techniques,

Praeger.

Goldstein, J, and J Gowa (2002), “U.S. national power and the post-war trading regime”,

World Trade Review 1(2): 153-170.

Irwin, D A, P C Mavroidis and A O Sykes (2011), The Genesis of the GATT, Cambridge

University Press.

Maggi, G (1999), “The Role of Multilateral Institutions in International Trade

Cooperation”, American Economic Review 89(1): 190-214.

Mattoo, A and R W Staiger (2019), “Trade Wars: What do they mean? Why are they

happening now? What are the costs?”, NBER Working Paper No. 25762.

McLaren, J (1997), “Size, Sunk Costs, and Judge Bowker’s Objection to Free Trade”,

American Economic Review 87(3): 400-20.

Ross, W (2017), “Most Favored Nation Rule Hurts Importers, Limits U.S. Trade”, The

Wall Street Journal, Opinion, 25 May.



41

Schwartz, W F and A O Sykes (1997), “The Economics of the Most Favored Nation

Clause”, in J S Bhandari and A O Sykes (eds), Economic Dimensions in International

Law: Comparative and Empirical Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, pp. 43-79.

Wallace, B B (1933), “Tariff bargaining”, Foreign Affairs, July, pp. 621–633.

About the authors

Aaditya Mattoo is Research Manager, Trade and Integration, at the World Bank. He

specializes in trade policy and international trade agreements, and provides policy

advice to governments. He is Co-Director of the World Development Report 2020 on

Global Value Chains. Prior to joining the Bank, Mr. Mattoo was Economic Counsellor

at the World Trade Organization. Before that he taught economics at the University of

Sussex and Churchill College, Cambridge University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics

from the University of Cambridge, and an M.Phil in Economics from the University

of Oxford. He has published on trade, trade in services, development and the WTO

in academic and other journals and his work has been cited in The Economist, The

Financial Times, The New York Times, and Time Magazine.

Robert W. Staiger is the Roth Family Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Sciences,

and Professor of Economics, at Dartmouth College. He is also a Research Associate at

the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Staiger’s research focuses on international trade policy rules and institutions, with

particular emphasis on the economics of the GATT/WTO. His research has been

published in numerous academic journals, and in a book, The Economics of the World

Trading System, co-authored with Kyle Bagwell and published by The MIT Press

(2002). Staiger recently served as Editor, with Kyle Bagwell, of The Handbook of

Commercial Policy, published by Elsevier in December 2016.

Staiger received his A.B. from Williams College in 1980 and his Ph.D. from Michigan

in 1985. He was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford from 1985 through

1991 and promoted to tenure in 1991. In 1993 Staiger joined the Economics Department

at Wisconsin, where he remained until his return to Stanford in 2006. In 2011 Staiger


42

rejoined the Economics Department at Wisconsin, before joining the Economics

Department at Dartmouth in the Fall of 2014.

Staiger was a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution (1988-89), an Alfred P. Sloan

Research Fellow (1990-92), a Senior Staff Economist at CEA (1991-92) and a Fellow

at CASBS at Stanford (1996-97). He was a Co-Editor of the Journal of International

Economics from 1995 to 2010 and served as Editor (with Charles Engel) from 2010

through 2017; he was a Reporter for the American Law Institute in its study of

Principles of Trade Law: The World Trade Organization (2002-12); and he has served

on the selection panel for the WTO’s Award for Young Economists since 2009. He is

also a Fellow of the Econometric Society (since 2008). In the Fall of 2016 Staiger gave

the Ohlin Lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics, and in the Spring of 2018

he gave the Graham Lecture at Princeton University.

45

4 The costs of a trade war

Ralph OssaUniversity of Zurich and CEPR

The established world trading system, based on the rules of what is now the WTO,

has long been remarkably successful at promoting trade policy cooperation. Over

the past 75 years, it has produced and secured extensive trade liberalisation, thereby

facilitating today’s unprecedented international economic integration. During this

process, it navigated even major challenges such as the Great Recession following the

2008 financial crisis, and therefore appeared well equipped to prevent countries from

reverting to large-scale protectionist policies.

This assessment has to be revised entirely following the radical shift in US trade policy

under President Trump. The most visible policy change is probably the trade war

between the US and China, in which the US is now imposing special tariffs on over half

of Chinese bilateral exports (Bown and Zhang 2019). But there has really been a whole

battery of revisionist trade policy measures, including the withdrawal from the Trans-

Pacific Partnership (TPP), the imposition of special tariffs on steel and aluminium

imports, the replacement of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the

announcement to consider special tariffs on EU auto imports, and even the threat to exit

the WTO.

This unexpected attack on trade policy cooperation has brought new relevance to

understanding the darker scenarios of trade policy. Will the US further increase its

tariffs against China? And does it have any incentives to also instigate trade wars with

its NAFTA partners or the EU? How large are the economic costs of a trade war? And

which countries are most vulnerable to the disruptions in trade flows it brings about?

In this chapter, I briefly comment on such scenarios based on the recent quantitative

trade policy literature. In doing so, I draw heavily on two of my own research articles

but also provide some original analysis.


46

Gains from trade

I begin by summarising what I know about the gains from trade, since these gains are

directly related to the costs of a trade war. After all, if trade itself is not an important

contributor to our prosperity, a disruption in trade can hardly cause much economic

harm. And there is much confusion about the size of the gains from trade even among

trade economists, with the most important misconception being that they are small.

My best guess is that the gains from trade account for one-quarter of worldwide real

income, in the sense that worldwide real income would be one-quarter lower if there

were no international trade (Ossa 2015). This estimate is derived from a standard

quantitative trade model with input-output linkages calibrated to 50 regions and 252

industries encompassing the entire world economy. This aggregate number masks a lot

of cross-country heterogeneity, driven mainly by the tendency of smaller countries to

have larger gains from trade. For example, while the gains from trade account for only

around one-tenth of US real income, they already account for around half of Swiss real

income.

This best guess is much higher than previous estimates merely because my analysis

encompasses a much larger range of industries. This simple extension makes a big

difference since the gains from trade are ultimately driven by ‘critical’ industries. For

example, having access to imported raw materials is absolutely crucial for countries

that are poorly endowed with natural resources. Similarly, having access to foreign

pharmaceuticals is absolutely crucial for countries that lack the capacity to produce

their own. Simple examples like this make clear that the gains from trade must be

substantial – everything else is just grossly implausible in my mind.

The assessment that trade matters is reinforced if one remembers why there are gains

from trade. Fundamentally, gains from trade are just gains from the division of labour.

And it should be self-evident to every reader that the division of labour is a fundamental

pillar of our prosperity – imagine what would happen if each of us had to produce

everything we consume ourselves! So, just like individuals gain from the exchange with

other individuals, countries also gain from the exchange with other countries, since the

gains from the division of labour do not stop at international borders.

The costs of a trade war

Ralph Ossa

47

Costs of a trade war

Against this background, we can now discuss the various trade war scenarios mentioned

above. In all of this, it is important to keep in mind that the gains from trade are an upper

bound to the costs of any trade war since autarky is always the worst-case scenario.

Let us turn first to the scenario of a full-fledged trade war. Trade wars are usually

interpreted as prisoner’s dilemmas, that is, harmful outcomes brought about by

individually rational behaviour (Bagwell and Staiger 2002). While there are gains

from trade, countries still have incentives to unilaterally impose import tariffs since

this allows them to benefit at other countries’ expense. A trade war arises when all

countries simultaneously engage in such beggar-thy-neighbour policies and tariffs rise

everywhere.

In recent work, I estimate that countries would impose tariffs of almost 60% in a fully

escalated trade war in an attempt to manipulate world prices in their favour and shift

profits towards their firms (Ossa 2014). I also estimate that such a trade war would be

very costly in the sense that it would wipe out around one-quarter of the gains from

trade. Applied to the current trade war between the US and China, this suggests that

there is still substantial room for escalation. So far, the US has threatened tariffs of 25%

should China not make major concessions, which is still well below the 60% ceiling

my analysis implies.

Building on this work, I have now performed a number of new simulations in order to

be able to better comment on current events. The main innovation is that I now consider

a larger sample of countries (20 instead of 7) so that I am not restricted to looking

only at the main trading blocs. To keep the analysis manageable, I do not solve again

for the best-response (Nash) tariffs but simply consider the effects of exogenously

raising tariffs to 60% for some or all country pairs. As a sensitivity check, I have also

considered 30% tariffs, which turned out to approximately halve all welfare effects. A

number of interesting findings emerge from this analysis.

First, the welfare effects of a fully escalated worldwide trade war are very heterogeneous,

just as one would expect. The big players such as China, the EU, and the US would

see real income losses of around -2%, which is significant but hardly an economic


48

catastrophe. But things look much worse for small open economies such as Switzerland,

which would see its real income fall by -14%. Even Canada or Mexico would be hit

hard by such a trade war, suffering real income losses of around -7%.

Second, a fully escalated bilateral trade war between the US and China would only

imply modest welfare losses for both economies. According to my calculations, US real

income would fall by -0.4% and Chinese real income by -0.7%, so that China appears

to be more vulnerable in this regard.

Third, instigating a US–EU trade war in addition to a US–China trade war would

benefit China and harm the US. In particular, China’s real income losses would fall to

-0.6% while the US real income losses would triple to -1.2%. Against this background,

one would expect the US to think twice before following up on threats to tax EU auto

exports, since such a move would contain significant risks.

Fourth, if the US were to engage in a trade war with China, the EU, and its NAFTA

partners, its losses would amount to almost three-quarters of the losses from a worldwide

trade war (-1.7% versus -2.3%). This implies that the US has already picked fights with

its most significant trading partners, which underlines how aggressive its trade policy

realignment has been.

An important caveat to all these calculations is that they are based on a long-run model,

which abstracts from adjustment costs. As a result, I would expect the short-run losses

from trade wars to be even larger, given that it takes firms time to rearrange supply

chains and workers time to identify new employment opportunities. However, I am not

aware of any thorough analysis of the short-term effects of trade wars, so this is mere

speculation at this point.

Conclusion

An important implication of these calculations is that countries have a shared interest

in trade policy cooperation. Engaging in trade wars is harmful for all participating

countries and this harm will ultimately be felt by their citizens. This basic point raises

hope that the current trade policy crisis is temporary and trade policy cooperation will

again become the norm.

The costs of a trade war

Ralph Ossa

49

References

Bown, C and E Zhang (2019), “Measuring Trump’s 2018 Trade Protection: Five

Takeaways”, PIIE Trade & Investment Policy Watch, 15 February.

Bagwell, K and R Staiger (2002), The Economics of the World Trading System, MIT

Press.

Ossa, R (2014), “Trade Wars and Trade Talks with Data”, American Economic Review

104(12): 4104-4146.

Ossa, R (2015), “Why Trade Matters After All”, Journal of International Economics

97(2): 266-277.

About the author

Ralph Ossa is the Kühne Foundation Professor of International Trade at the University

of Zurich. His research focuses on international economics with a particular emphasis

on questions of policy relevance. For example, he has explored the economics of

trade wars and trade talks and estimated how much countries gain from international

trade. Prior to moving to Zurich, he served on the faculty of the University of Chicago

Booth School of Business. He holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of

Economics.

51

5 How exporters respond to tariff changes

Doireann FitzgeraldFederal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and University of Minnesota

Since January 2018, the US has been engaged in a trade war with China, and has

imposed tariffs on iron and steel affecting many trading partners. It is possible that

the trade war with China may escalate, and further trade policy actions against other

countries have also been floated. If taken, these actions would lead to retaliation. So,

this seems like a good time to sum up what we know about how exporters respond

to tariff increases and how, as a result, a trade war might affect the US from both an

importing and an exporting perspective.

Tariffs drive a wedge between the prices charged by exporters and the price that

purchasers must pay in order to import. How much import prices rise when tariffs rise

depends on whether exporters are prepared to reduce their prices and markups to bear

some of the incidence of the tariff. The combined evidence from trade liberalisations

and episodes of tariff increases (discussed below) suggests that when a country raises

its import tariffs, foreign firms do not adjust prices or markups to offset the tariff. As

a result, the price of imports rises one-for-one with the tariff change. Larger and more

productive foreign firms continue to export to the affected market, but because buyers

face higher prices, they demand less, and continuing exporters see their sales fall.

Meanwhile, in the face of this effective reduction in demand, some marginal foreign

firms stop exporting and others never start, when, in a counterfactual world without the

tariff increase, they would have done so. As a result, the quantity and variety of imports

falls.

Within the country that raises tariffs, unproductive import-competing firms are less

likely to exit than under lower tariffs. This is at least partly due to their ability to charge


52

customers higher prices in an environment where import prices rise. But if trading

partners retaliate by raising their tariffs, domestic exporters are hurt. Since even marginal

exporters are likely to be more productive than the least productive import-competing

firms, this implies a shift of resources away from productive towards unproductive

firms.

Where does the evidence come from?

Because the postwar period has seen mostly trade liberalisations, most of the evidence

on exporter responses to tariff changes is based on trade liberalisations rather than

tariff increases. Liberalisations tend to be multilateral and affect many trading partners,

whereas episodes of tariff increases tend to be unilateral and directed at only one or

two countries. Some economic theories suggest that firms might respond differently

to tariff increases and decreases, but the available evidence suggests that exporters

respond symmetrically to both, and that their responses to multilateral and unilateral

tariff changes do not differ measurably.

Evidence from MFN tariff reductions

In two recent papers (Fitzgerald and Haller 2018, Fitzgerald et al. 2019), my co-authors

and I look at how Irish firms responded to changes in tariffs over the period 1996-2009.

These tariff changes were principally due to reductions in most-favoured nation (MFN)

tariffs offered by countries such as the US, Japan, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to

all WTO members, including Ireland. These reductions were agreed under the Uruguay

Round of the GATT, which was signed in 1994 and then gradually phased in over the

following ten years. We focus on the impact of these tariff changes on export activity.

We control for the effect of changes in exporters’ production costs by comparing what

happened to a firm’s exports to markets where tariffs changed with what happened to

its exports to markets (principally the EU) where tariffs did not change.

We find that when tariffs fell in a particular market, the rate at which medium and

large firms (i.e. firms with 100+ employees) started exporting to this market increased.

Firms which already exported to the affected market did not change the price charged

How exporters respond to tariff changes

Doireann Fitzgerald

53

to buyers. So, the price faced by purchasers wanting to import from Ireland fell one-

for-one with the reduction in tariffs. As one might expect given that purchasers faced

lower prices, the quantity of exports increased markedly for these firms. Combining the

impact on export entry and exit with that on the value of exports of continuing exporters,

our results suggest an elasticity of aggregate exports with respect to a tariff change of

between -2.3 and -5.2, with our preferred estimate lying in the neighbourhood of -4.

This number means that if the tariff firms face in a particular market falls from 10% to

0%, there will be a 38% increase in exports to that market.

Evidence from antidumping duties

The period between the founding of the WTO and the events of 2016 did not see much in

the way of large-scale tariff increases, but various countries levied antidumping duties.

Antidumping duties differ from MFN tariff changes and from tariff changes negotiated

in the context of preferential trade agreements in that they are temporary. In addition,

they are targeted at a particular country or countries, and even at specific firms. Lu et

al. (2013) examine the response of Chinese exporters to antidumping duties levied on

them by the US. They find that marginal Chinese exporters exited the US market in

response to these duties, while there was a modest decrease in sales for surviving (large)

exporters. Chinese export prices did not respond to antidumping duties, implying that

the duties were passed on one-for-one to US purchasers of Chinese exports. These

findings are exactly what one would predict based on extrapolating the responses of

Irish firms to reductions in MFN tariffs.

Pierce (2011) examines the flip side of these anti-dumping duties. He looks at the impact

on protected plants in the US. These duties were directly solicited by the protected plants,

so there is a potential issue of reverse causality which Pierce addresses by comparing

plants which successfully undertook antidumping cases with those whose antidumping

cases were ultimately unsuccessful. He finds that antidumping duties slowed the exit of

less-productive US producers. The evidence suggests that these producers were able to

survive because they increased both prices and markups, consistent with industry prices

rising in response to antidumping duties.


54

Evidence from Trump’s trade war

Two recent papers (Amiti et al. 2019, Fajgelbaum et al. 2019) investigate the impact

of unilateral tariff actions undertaken by the US administration in 2018, as well as

retaliatory actions taken against the US. Both papers make use of publicly available

trade data at the product level. Although they cannot look at responses of individual

firms, they arrive at conclusions consistent with our work on Irish exporters and the firm-

level evidence on antidumping duties. Amiti et al. find that tariff changes were passed

on one-for-one into import prices, leaving exporter prices unchanged. Meanwhile, they

estimate that the elasticity of US imports with respect to tariff changes was around

-6.5, while the elasticity of US exports with respect to retaliatory tariff changes in

partner countries was -3.9. This latter number is similar to the elasticity we found using

Irish exporters’ responses to tariff reductions (i.e. -4). In addition, Amiti et al. find that

import variety – measured using HS 10-digit products – declined in response to US

tariff increases. Fajgelbaum et al. find broadly similar results.

The role of exchange rates

It is sometimes suggested that the impact of tariff changes may be partially offset by

movements in exchange rates. For example, if China lets its currency depreciate against

the dollar, this could potentially reverse the impact of tariff increases. In Fitzgerald and

Haller (2018), my co-author and I directly address this possibility. We find that along

all dimensions, exports are much less sensitive to changes in exchange rates than they

are to changes in tariffs. In Fitzgerald et al. (2019), we show that this is partly due to the

fact that exporters absorb some portion of exchange rate changes by adjusting markups,

and partly due to the fact that even conditional on changes in markups, export quantities

are much less sensitive to changes in exchange rates than they are to changes in tariffs.

So, while there may be some offset of higher US tariffs on Chinese imports through

exchange rate movements, this is likely to be modest. For full offset, the movement

in exchange rates would have to be very large, and potentially very destabilising to

international capital flows. In addition, this offset can go in one direction only. In the

case of a trade war, depreciation against the dollar may reduce the impact of US tariffs

How exporters respond to tariff changes

Doireann Fitzgerald

55

on imports from China, but it exacerbates the impact of retaliatory tariffs on US exports

to China.

References

Amiti, M, S Redding and D Weinstein (2019), “The Impact of the 2018 Trade War on

U.S. Prices and Welfare”, CEPR Discussion Paper 13564.

Fajgelbaum, P, P Goldberg, P Kennedy and A Khandelwal (2019), “The Return to

Protectionism”, NBER Working Paper 25638,

Fitzgerald, D and S Haller (2018), “Exporters and Shocks”, Journal of International

Economics 113: 154-171.

Fitzgerald, D, Y Yedid-Levi and S Haller (2019), “Can Sticky Quantities Explain Export

Insensitivity to Exchange Rates?”, working paper.

Lu, Y, Z Tao and Y Zhang (2013), “How Do Exporters Respond to Antidumping

Investigations?”, Journal of International Economics 91: 290-300.

Pierce, J (2011), “Plant-Level Responses to Antidumping Duties: Evidence from U.S.

Manufacturers”, Journal of International Economics 85: 222-233.

About the author

Doireann Fitzgerald is a Senior Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of

Minneapolis and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Minnesota. Her research

focuses on international trade and international macroeconomics. She received a Ph.D.

in economics from Harvard University and a BA from University College Dublin. Her

work has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies,

and the Journal of International Economics.

57

6 Trade wars in the GVC era

Emily J. BlanchardTuck School of Business, Dartmouth College and CEPR

The nature of global commerce has changed dramatically over the past 40 years,

with the meteoric rise of global value chain (GVC) trade.1 Simply put, countries and

companies make goods differently today than in the past. In the 21st century, products

are ‘made in the world’, as firms combine raw materials, inputs, labour, and ideas –

the many slivers of value that ultimately make up a final product – each sourced from

around the world according to specific cost-benefit tradeoffs for every component

part of the value chain. This phenomenon has been made possible by innovations in

communications and transportation technologies, together with institutional and market

reforms that have allowed scores of countries to join (or rejoin) the global economic

landscape. GVC trade – measured as a dramatic rise in the trade in value-added sub-

components relative to gross trade – is the quantifiable manifestation of this ‘made in

the world’ global production revolution.

In turn, the rise of GVC trade has reshaped the economic consequences and political

contours of trade protection. While trade wars have always been disruptive, they are

particularly expensive and divisive in the GVC era.

This chapter builds on insights from recent research to identify three critical dimensions

of GVC trade that promise to make today’s trade wars more economically costly and

more politically complex than previous trade wars. Along the way, the discussion

highlights distinctive aspects of the current, 2018-2019 trade actions that could carry

additional, unintentional costs for the US economy.

1 See Baldwin (2016) for an overview of the GVC phenomenon and Johnson and Noguera (2017) for an authoritative

empirical examination.


58

The first point is obvious but important: GVCs amplify the effects of tariffs. Because

tariffs are (typically) applied to the gross value of a good when it crosses the border,

rather than just the ‘new’ value added, every border crossing increases the total tariff

bill associated with production.

For example, suppose that a pair of blue jeans is made in three stages: first, raw cotton

is grown in country A and exported to country B; then country B processes the cotton

into denim fabric, which is exported to country C; finally, country C cuts, sews, and

finishes the jeans to be sold, ultimately, in country A. If each country imposes a uniform

10% tariff on all imports, a tariff will be paid three times during the production process,

with escalating costs as the gross value of trade increases from raw cotton, to the cotton

fabric, to the finished product. Had the jeans been produced start to finish in country C,

the tariff would be paid just once (when the final product is shipped to the consumer in

country A), and the total cost of production, inclusive of tariffs, would be lower.

The implication is immediate: the costs of higher tariffs in a trade war will be greater

(potentially many times greater) in a trading system with GVC trade than in an

otherwise equivalent world without it. The corollary (discussed further below) is that

higher tariffs in general, and trade wars in particular, may induce firms to shorten or

otherwise reshape their global supply chains.2

The second point concerns not the total cost of a trade war, but the distribution of that

cost across different stakeholders. Fundamentally, GVC linkages mean that the burden

of tariffs falls differently among consumers, workers, and firms involved throughout the

value chain. As explained below, some of the costs of trade protection may ultimately

be borne by upstream producers in the country imposing the tariff,3 while some of the

producer-side benefits from trade protection enjoyed by local import-competing firms

may be passed along to foreign interests.

The same example of blue jean production serves to illustrate. Suppose now that

country A increases its tariff on all products (including blue jeans) to 25%. If country

2 See Johnson and Moxnes (2016), Head and Mayer (2016), and Antras and De Gortari (2017) for efforts to quantify the

extent of potential global supply chain dislocation in response to rising trade costs.

3 See Blanchard (2010, 2015) for formal treatment and broader policy implications of this point.

Trade wars in the global value chain era

Emily J. Blanchard

59

A’s consumers constitute a sufficient share of global demand for blue jeans, then an

increase in country A’s tariff may drive down the export price received by the producers

of jeans in country C. (That is, the incidence of the tariff will be shared by consumers

in country A, who pay higher prices, and producers in country C, who receive lower

prices, with the government of country A collecting the difference as tariff revenue.)

By the same logic, if country C’s jeans producers are an important source of global

demand for denim fabric, producers of jeans in country C may be able to pass on some

of the fall in their revenue to producers of fabric in country B, who would then receive

a lower export price. In turn, if country B is a sufficiently important market for country

A’s raw cotton, the price of cotton in country A may also fall. Thus, ultimately, the

costs of country A’s tariffs on imported blue jeans will be shared between country A’s

consumers and all of the producers of value added embedded in the imported blue

jeans, including, potentially, the producers of raw cotton in country A.

Meanwhile, if country A had a local producer of blue jeans competing head-to-head

with imports from country C, that producer would gain from the additional protection

afforded by the 25% tariff. But if that local producer was owned by a foreign interest,

or sourced its inputs from abroad, part of the benefit of that trade protection would be

passed up the value chain, outside of country A. Thus, GVC linkages mean that country

A may see its tariff protection eroded, even as it must internalise more of the costs of its

tariff hike (Blanchard et al. 2016).

The extent to which producers in each country bear the costs of the tariff depend on a

host of factors, including market power, bargaining relationships, input customisation,

and trade volumes. Whatever the details, the broad implication is the same: GVC

trade means that the costs and benefits of higher tariffs – and by extension, trade wars

– may extend well beyond the immediate ‘intentional’ targets to include countries

and companies around the world, including the very country that imposed the new

protection at the outset.

The third point recognises that GVCs are themselves determined by market forces.

Because GVC structure is the result of strategic sourcing and foreign investment decisions

of globally engaged firms, tariffs may have large, long-lasting, and unanticipated

consequences for the pattern of global production. If rising tariffs (or even just the

threat of a trade war) causes firms to change how and where products are made in the


60

world, this additional production dislocation will carry additional efficiency, job, profit,

and welfare losses. Moreover, given the complex calculus faced by firms responding

to changes in the global economic landscape, there is good reason to believe that global

firms may not respond the way the importing country wants or expects.

Production dislocation is particularly likely under a tit-for-tat tariff escalation, in which

multiple countries raise tariffs at the same time. All else equal, higher tariffs give

firms an incentive to consolidate their global supply networks into fewer countries,

border crossings, and (thus) vulnerabilities. But where firms choose to consolidate

that production depends on a host of factors, including proximity not only to expected

consumers but also to raw material, critical input suppliers, local economic regulations,

policy certainty, access to skilled and low-cost labour, and more. To the extent that

some of the 2018-2019 tariffs are intended to induce producers to ‘re-shore’ production

in the US, they may have unintended consequences if firms instead balkanise their

production networks somewhere else. “America first” could backfire.

A noteworthy irony, given President Trump’s stated goal to bring jobs back to US

shores, is that the administration has imposed new tariffs disproportionately on imported

intermediate goods (Bown and Zhang 2019)— the very inputs that are necessary for

US manufacturers to produce and sell their products competitively in the US and global

markets. If the intent is to induce US manufacturers to ‘re-shore’ production to the

US (or to dissuade US firms from moving final assembly/downstream production

overseas), lower tariffs on imported intermediate goods would be in order. Higher

tariffs on intermediate goods – together with increased uncertainty over the future of

US tariff policy more generally4 – run the risk of inducing firms to shift their current

production patterns away from the US and into ‘factory Asia’ or ‘factory Europe’.

Global firms seem to appreciate the importance of these GVC linkages and what they

mean for the potential escalating and unanticipated costs of trade wars. The US Chamber

of Commerce has been a relentless advocate for a quick and amicable resolution of the

2018-2019 trade frictions. At the same time, the United Steelworkers union, which

represents nearly one million US worker-members in manufacturing, metals, forestry

4 Handley and Limao (2017) find that the economic costs of trade policy uncertainty can be as large as tariffs themselves.


Emily J. Blanchard

61

and beyond – industries that employ workers up and down the value chain across myriad

traded products – has been an outspoken critic of renegotiating NAFTA in general,

and the US steel and aluminium tariffs against Canada in particular. Perhaps most

notably, until recently, many governments had been implementing policies consistent

with a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between GVCs and trade policy.

According to several studies, the contours of GVC linkages and firms’ global sourcing

operations were reflected in trade policy before the 2018-2019 trade war, not least in

the US.5

Early evidence suggests that even in the very short run, the current trade war is taking a

toll on US firms and consumers.6 The key question in the months and years to come is

how, if these tariffs continue, they will begin to feed back through global value chains

at the expense of firms and workers in the US, China, and around the world. How,

ultimately, will firms shift, consolidate, and potentially balkanise their production to

mitigate the costs of tit-for-tat tariffs and the uncertainty of future trade wars? The

consequences of this trade war may be slow to unfold and long lasting once they do.

References

Antras P and A De Gortari (2017), “On the Geography of Global Value Chains”, NBER

Working Paper 395246.

Amiti, M, S Redding, and D Weinstein (2019), “The Impact of the 2018 Trade War on

US Price and Welfare”, CEPR Discussion Paper 13564.

Baldwin, R (2016), The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New

Globalization, Harvard University Press.

5 Blanchard et al. (2016) and Blanchard and Matschke (2015) provide empirical evidence that GVC linkages and the

pattern of multinational firms’ global sourcing activities (respectively) influence tariff setting in practice.

6 Amiti et al. (2019) and Fajgelbaum et al. (2019) find evidence that in the past year, most of the costs of the new 2018 US

tariffs have been passed through to US consumers as higher prices. The first paper finds additionally that the 2018 tariff

increases have already induced significant changes in US firms’ supply networks and a decline in firms’ and consumers’

access to imported varieties.


62

Blanchard, E (2010), “Reevaluating the Role of Trade Agreements: Does Investment

Globalization make the WTO Obsolete?”, Journal of International Economics 82(1):

63-72

Blanchard, E (2015), “A Shifting Mandate: International Ownership, Global

Fragmentation, and a Case for Deeper Integration under the WTO”, World Trade

Review 14(1): 87-99

Blanchard E and X Matschke (2015), “U.S. Multinationals and Preferential Market

Access”, Review of Economics and Statistics 97(4): 839-854

Blanchard, E, C P Bown and R Johnson (2016), “Global Supply Chains and Trade

Policy”, NBER Working paper 21883.

Bown C and E Zhang (2019), “Measuring Trump’s 2018 Trade War: 5 Takeaways”,

Peterson Institute for International Economics, 15 February.

Fajgelbaum, P, P Goldberg, P Kennedy, and A Khandelwal (2019), “The Return to

Protectionism”, NBER Working Paper 25638.

Handley, K and N Limao (2017), “Policy Uncertainty, Trade and Welfare: Theory and

Evidence for China and the U.S.”, American Economic Review 107 (9): 2731-83.

Head, K and T Mayer (2016), “Brands in Motion: How Frictions Shape Multinational

Production”, CEPR Discussion Paper 10797 (summary and extensions available on

VoxEU).

Johnson, R and A Moxnes (2016), “Technology, Trade Costs, and the Pattern of Trade

with Multistage Production”, Working Paper.

Johnson, R and G Noguera (2017), “A Portrait of Trade in Value Added over Four

Decades”, Review of Economics and Statistics 99(5): 896-911.

https://voxeu.org/article/consequences-brexit-and-trumpit-multinational-car-industry

https://sites.google.com/site/robjohnson41/research/multistage

https://sites.google.com/site/robjohnson41/research/multistage


Emily J. Blanchard

63

About the author

Emily J. Blanchard is an Associate Professor at the Tuck School of Business at

Dartmouth College and a Research Fellow with the Center for Economic Policy

Research. Professor Blanchard’s research lies at the intersection of international

economics and public policy. She has written extensively on how foreign investment

and global value chains are changing the role of trade agreements in the 21st century,

and how globalization and education shape political and economic outcomes within and

across countries. Her research is published in leading journals, including the Review of

Economic Studies, the Journal of International Economics, the Review of Economics

and Statistics, and the World Trade Review, and she serves on several editorial boards.

Bringing research to practice, she has worked in collaboration with the World Trade

Organization, World Bank, UNIDO, Institute for Research on Public Policy, and others.

She holds a PhD and MSc in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison

and an AB from Wellesley College.

65

7 Supply chain linkages and financial markets: Evaluating the costs of the US-China trade war

Yi Huang, Chen Lin, Sibo Liu and Heiwai TangGraduate Institute and CEPR; Hong Kong University; Lingnan University; Johns Hopkins University

On 22 March 2018, the Trump administration started a trade war with China by issuing

a presidential memorandum, which proposed to impose 25% tariffs on over $50 billion

worth of Chinese imports. On 10 July 2018, it raised the stakes by imposing tariffs

of 10% on an additional set of Chinese imports worth $200 billion. Both times, the

Chinese government retaliated immediately, imposing tariffs on US imports of similar

value. Two recent studies find that US tariffs on China have led to a significant welfare

loss (about $7.8 billion, or 0.04% of US GDP) and significant increases in consumer

prices in the US, due to an almost complete pass-through of the tariffs to US prices

(Amiti et al. 2019, Fajgelbaum et al. 2019).

In a recent study, we evaluate firms’ equity market responses to the various trade war

announcements by both the US and Chinese governments in 2018 and 2019 (Huang et

al. 2018). We find that within an industry, firms’ reactions to the announcements are

heterogeneous, depending on their direct and indirect exposure to US–China trade.

More specifically, US publicly listed firms that are more dependent on exports to and

imports from China showed lower equity returns but higher default risks in the three-

day window around 22 March – the day President Trump signed the first executive

memorandum imposing tariffs on Chinese exports. Chinese publicly listed firms that

are more reliant on the US as a market for final sales (but not inputs) were also affected

significantly more than firms with no direct exposure within the same industry. We also

find that firms’ indirect exposure to US–China trade through domestic input-output

linkages impacted their responses to the announcement.


66

These findings suggest that the structure of US–China trade is much more complex

than is suggested by the simplistic view that the trade war against China will shift

profits from China to the US and only harm Chinese companies that depend on the US

markets. Consumers and firms in both countries that are indirectly linked to supply

chains involving US and Chinese companies will also be affected. Tariff-induced

increases in production costs can be amplified along supply chains until the final stage,

when goods are sold to consumers.

Evidence from financial markets based on an event-study approach

As Figure 1 illustrates, the S&P 500 index dropped by 4.5% between 21 March 21 and

23 March 2018 in response to the US presidential memorandum based on the Section

301 Investigation of China’s Laws, Policies, Practices, or Actions. Public interest in

the trade war peaked on 22 March, as measured by the frequency of searches for “trade

war” on Google. Similar declines in the stock market index and spikes in public interest

are also observed for the other two announcement dates (3 and 4 April). These market

responses suggest that the US presidential memorandum that initiated the trade war

came as a surprise. In China, the US presidential memorandum in March also came as

a surprise, bringing down the China Securities Index (CSI) 300 by 4.5% between 22

March and 24 March (Figure 2).

We exploit this unexpected and abrupt policy announcement by the US government

on 22 March and apply an event-study approach to examine publicly listed firms’

market responses to the announcement in both countries. We use a novel dataset that

reports firms’ intertwining input-output relationships, together with various datasets on

companies’ financial outcomes and international trade, to assess a US (Chinese) firm’s

direct exposure to imports from and exports to China (the US), as well as US firms’

indirect exposure to trade with China through their engagement in global value chains.

Supply chain linkages and financial markets: Evaluating the costs of the US-China trade war

Yi Huang, Chen Lin, Sibo Liu and Heiwai Tang

67

Figure 1 American public interest in the trade war and the Equity Market Index

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Public interest in “trade war” S&P 500

US announcestariffs on steeland aluminium

US PresidentialMemorandum

April 3: USTR provisional listof imports for new dutiesApril 4: China announces a25% tariff rate on a list ofproducts imported from the US

Note: The solid line indicates the Standard and Poor (S&P) 500 index (right-hand scale), while the dashed line shows public searches for “trade war”, as measured by Google Trends (left-hand scale).

We find significant and heterogeneous responses to the announcement of tariff hikes

across listed firms in both countries. In the three-day window surrounding 22 March

2018, US publicly listed companies that export more to (or import more from) China

experienced lower stock returns, as illustrated by Figure 3. Specifically, in the three-

day window around 22 March, we find that after controlling for standard firm-level

characteristics and industry fixed effects, a ten percentage point increase in a firm’s

share of sales to China is associated with a 0.5% lower average cumulative abnormal

stock return, while firms that directly source inputs from China have a 0.6% lower

average cumulative abnormal stock return than those that do not. In addition, firms that

are more exposed to US–China trade experienced higher default risks, as revealed by a

sudden increase in the implied CDS spread over the same three-day period.


68

Figure 2 Chinese public interest in the trade war and equity market index

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Public interest in “trade war” CSI 300

US PresidentialMemorandum

April 3: USTR provisional list of imports for new dutiesApril 4: China announces a 25% tariff rate on a list ofproducts imported from the US

Note: The solid line indicates the China Securities Index (CSI) 300 index (right-hand scale), while the dashed line shows public searches for “trade war”, as measured by Baidu search intensity (left-hand scale).

Our research also exploits the lists of highly disaggregated products that are subject

to tariffs imposed by either government. Using natural language processing of 10-K

reports filed by US listed firms to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), we

measure a company’s share of sales that are subject to the different rounds of tariffs,

based on product descriptions. We find that US listed firms that derive proportionally

larger sales from products that were subject to the tariffs imposed by the Chinese

government on 23 March experienced a larger drop in cumulative equity returns around

the announcement date on average. Using US bill of lading data, we can also measure

US firms’ dependence on imported inputs from China that were subject to tariffs. We

find that the weighted average of a US firm’s import tariffs is negatively correlated with

its three-day cumulative stock return around the announcement date.1 These results

1 The weighted averages are constructed based on the US’ 3 April list, with weights equal to import shares in the firm’s

total imports.



69

complement the finding that US tariffs can substantially raise the prices of imported

inputs from China, and thus US firms’ costs of production.

Figure 3 US firms’ cumulative abnormal returns and share of sales from China

0.0

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3CAR

[−1,+1]

0 .05 .1 .15 .2 .25Revenue from China

Note: This figure presents the binned scatter plots for the relationship between a firm’s cumulative abnormal returns adjusted by the market model and its revenue from China.

We find that these negative financial market responses are not the result of overreactions

to news. The medium-term (30-day) effects are significantly larger, while the responses

of more exposed US firms to subsequent trade war announcements continue to be

negative, but weaker. This suggests that the news of a further deteriorating US-China

relationship was perceived by the market as less surprising. We also find significantly

positive market responses for the exposed firms to the progress made in the US–China

trade talks that took place in Beijing between 7 and 9 January 2019. Taken together,

these findings suggest that in the absence of real-time economic data, one can use high-

frequency financial market data to evaluate the impact of a policy shock on individual

firms, and possibly on macroeconomic outcomes.

The effects of the 22 March memorandum on the Chinese financial market were

also substantial. Chinese listed firms that are more dependent on sales in the US

demonstrated lower stock returns in that three-day window. After controlling for


70

standard firm characteristics and industry fixed effects, a ten percentage point increase

in the share of exports to the US in total sales is associated with a 1% larger drop in

a firm’s cumulative abnormal stock return in the three-day window surrounding 22

March. However, Chinese firms that import US intermediate inputs did not experience

lower stock returns.

Value chains matter

We also find that a firm’s indirect exposure through global value chains matters. We

construct production networks that extend up to two levels upstream in the supply chain

(i.e. suppliers of a company’s suppliers) of each US listed firm. For example, we find

that two important US multinational firms – General Electronic and General Motors –

have very dense production networks in the US and that most of the firms’ direct and

indirect suppliers have exposure to China through input sourcing.

Using the network data, we gauge individual firms’ equity market reactions to the

trade war announcements, due to their direct and indirect exposure to US–China trade

through supply chain linkages. On the import side of US listed companies, both direct

and indirect exposure to Chinese imports through domestic production networks matter,

with the direct exposure to input suppliers in China having a greater quantitative effect.

On the export side, both direct and indirect exposure to sales in China matter, but it is

the indirect exposure through downstream US firms’ exports to China that has a greater

negative impact on firms’ stock returns, compared to the direct sales exposure.

Conclusions

Our research highlights significant financial market losses – in addition to economic

losses – in both the US and China due to the trade war in 2018. Our findings for the

US reveal adverse effects induced by the perceived increases in the prices of inputs

from China due to US tariffs and the perceived reduction in sales in China due to

China’s retaliatory tariffs. Our analysis on Chinese listed firms demonstrates that firms’

export exposure – but not their import exposure – determines their responses to the US

announcement of tariffs against China.



71

These firms’ market responses demonstrate that the structure of US–China trade is

much more complex than the simplistic view of global trade that prompted Trump’s

trade war. Our findings show that the winners and losers in the US–China trade war

depend on firms’ positioning in, and exposure to, the global value chains shared by

the two countries. While raising the prices of imported goods can transfer profits from

foreign to domestic businesses, our study shows that the benefits are far outweighed

by the (perceived) increases in input costs. Given the complex structure of US–China

trade, most of the firms in both countries were not isolated from such negative cost

shocks.

References

Amiti, M, S J Redding and D E Weinstein (2019), “The Impact of the 2018 Trade War

on U.S. Prices and Welfare”, CEPR Discussion Paper 13564.

Fajgelbaum, P, P Goldberg, P Kennedy and A Khandelwal (2019), “The Return to

Protectionism”, NBER Working Paper 25638.

Huang, Y, C Lin, S Liu and H Tang (2019), “Trade Linkages and Firm Value: Evidence

from the 2018 US-China ‘Trade War”, SSRN working paper 3227972.

About the authors

Yi Huang is Associate Professor of International Economics and Pictet Chair in Finance

and Development at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies,

Geneva. He has a PhD from the London Business School and a Master in Economics

from the China Centre for Economic Research in Beijing University. Previously an

Economist in the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund, Yi Huang

comes to the Graduate Institute with expertise in international macroeconomics and

finance. His current research projects include precautionary saving, liquid asset holding,

financial frictions and FX reserves as well as the effects of valuation adjustment on

external wealth. Yi Huang also serves as the Research Associate at the Globalization &

Monetary Policy Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Visiting Research

Fellow, Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3227972

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3227972


72

Chen Lin is a Professor in Finance at Department of Finance, Chinese University

of Hong Kong. He received his B.Eng. in Civil Engineering from the South China

University of Technology in 2000 and an MBA (2004), M.A. (2005) and Ph.D. (2006)

from Warrington College of Business Administration, University of Florida. His

research interest includes banking and financial institutions, mutual funds, corporate

finance, corporate governance, financial regulation, public economics, and economic

development.

Sibo Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, Lingnan University.

His research interests include law and finance, innovation, and entrepreneurial finance.

Sibo received his Ph.D. in finance from the University of Hong Kong.

Heiwai Tang is Associate Professor of International Economics at the Johns Hopkins

School of Advanced International Studies and Research Fellow of the Federal Reserve

Bank of Dallas, the Center of Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESIfo) in Germany,

as well as the Globalisation and Economic Policy Center in the UK. He has been a

Consultant to the International Finance Corporation, World Bank, Asian Development

Bank, United Nations, and held visiting positions at the Harvard University, MIT Sloan

School of Management, Stanford University, IMF, and RIETI. Tang received his Ph.D.

in economics from MIT and undergraduate degree in mathematics from UCLA. His

research interests span a wide range of theoretical and empirical topics in international

trade, with a specific focus on production networks and global value chains.

Part 3

The challenges for the world trading system

75

8 Misdirection and the trade war malediction of 2018: Scaling the US–China bilateral tariff hikes

Simon J. Evenett and Johannes FritzUniversity of St. Gallen and CEPR; University of St. Gallen

Misdirection is said to be an important element in the magician’s toolkit. Dariel

Fitzkee, who made important contributions to the theory of magic, once wrote “The

true skill of the magician is in the skill he exhibits in influencing the spectators mind”

(Fitzkee 1975). President Trump has sought to persuade US and other interests that

unfair Chinese trade practices are the source of American economic malaise and that

the remedy is to impose tariff hikes on Chinese exports so as to induce policy change

in Beijing.

But has there been another form of misdirection? The overt nature of Trump’s 2018

tariff hikes against Chinese exports have been taken by many trade policy analysts

as the most profound challenge to the existing order of trade rules witnessed since

the creation of the WTO. These analysts have focused on tariff increase that affect a

bilateral trade flow which amounted to just 4.2% of world trade in 2017. To others,

President Trump’s behaviour is such an exceptional case that the system cannot be

faulted just because it could not deter such extraordinary behaviour.

In this chapter we present evidence that casts doubt on the latter interpretations of

recent Sino-US trade tensions.1 We do so by contrasting the magnitude of the trade

covered by the US-China tariff increases in 2018 with the amount of cross-border

trade affected by other policy distortions (i) between those two countries in 2018, (ii)

1 Much of the evidence presented in this chapter was first published in November 2018 in the 23rd Global Trade Alert

report (Evenett and Fritz 2018).


76

between those two countries since 2009 (facilitating a comparison between the 2018

tariff increases and the installed base of protectionism affecting US-Chinese bilateral

trade), and (iii) compared to the import distortions implemented worldwide since 2009.

Doing so, essentially, puts the so-called trade war of 2018 in perspective.

Sino-US bilateral trade impediments implemented in 2018

Using information in the Global Trade Alert database on public policy interventions

implemented by the Chinese and US governments during 2018, almost all of which were

documented from official sources,2 plus detailed United Nations trade data on goods

trade,3 we computed the total value of Chinese exports (using 2017 data) that faced US

tariff increases in 2018, that faced other US trade policies that affected only China in

2018, that faced US tariff increases in 2018 that affected multiple countries (including,

clearly, China), and that faced other non-tariff US policies that affected multiple

countries in 2018. We also computed the same totals for US policies implemented in

2017 (using 2016 trade data) and during the second Obama administration (reporting

the average trade affected during the relevant four-year term.)

The amounts of Chinese exports affected is presented in Figure 1. The tariff increases

that targeted Chinese exports in 2018 stand out in comparison to other US trade policy

interventions affecting China in 2018. Still, such was the scale of the US trade policy

interventions against Chinese exports in 2018 that a total of $369 billion of the latter

were affected, nearly $100 billion larger than the headline figure of $275 billion

reported in many newspapers.

In another sense 2018 stand outs: over four times as much Chinese exports faced new

trade distortions implemented by the US in 2018 than in 2017 and during the second

Obama administration. On these statistics, then, there appears to be a break in US trade

policymaking towards China.

2 To be precise, 90.9% of Chinese harmful measures were documented using official sources; for the US the corresponding

percentage exceeds 99%.

3 At the six-digit level of disaggregation, the finest grain data available for analysis of global trade flows.

https://www.globaltradealert.org/

Misdirection and the trade war malediction of 2018: Scaling the US–China bilateral tariff hikes

Simon J. Evenett and Johannes Fritz

77

Figure 1 Seen in terms of flows of trade affected, US trade policy actions against

China in 2018 were exceptional

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Source: Evenett and Fritz (2018).

The parallel computations for Chinese commercial policy actions taken that disadvantage

US exports are represented in Figure 2.4 Last year saw a shift in the form of Chinese

actions taken against US exporters from policy instruments that affected multiple trade

partners towards tariff increases that only target American exports. Comparing Figures

1 and 2 reveals that in 2018 Chinese exports affected by US harmful actions are at

least three times US exports at risk by Chinese policies. Of course, the fact US exports

to China are a fraction of those in the opposite direction limits the degree of Chinese

retaliation on US exports. Still, that retaliation is partial.

4 This analysis examines the impact of Chinese policy on US exports, but does not consider how Chinese policy affects

sales by US multinationals in China to local Chinese consumers.


78

Figure 2 Chinese partial retaliation to the US tariff hikes of 2018

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Seventy percent of US-Chinese bilateral exports faced trade distortions before the tariff hikes of 2018

The 2018 tariff hikes can be benchmarked against the installed base of US

discrimination against Chinese exports, and vice versa. Using information on the US

policy interventions that disadvantaged Chinese exports in force during the second

Obama administration, during 2017, and during 2018,5 it is possible to gauge the extent

to which the 2018 actions added to the overall coverage of Chinese exports facing US

trade distortions.

5 Again, taken from the Global Trade Alert database. More specifically, the relevant harmful commercial policies used in

calculations here are those implemented since 1 November 2008. In principle, there could be US trade policies harming

Chinese exports that were implemented before that date and that still harmed Chinese exports since the start of the second

Obama administration. In which case, the amount of Chinese exports facing US protectionism before the tariff hikes of

2018 may have been higher and the jump witnessed in Figure 3 would be even smaller.



79

Figure 3 By 2017 less than 30% of Chinese exports to the US did not face some

policy-related trade distortion

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Figure 3 reveals that before the US tariff hikes of 2018, over 70% of Chinese exports

to the US already faced one or more US trade distortions. Any notion that the ‘trade

war’ has disrupted unfettered Chinese exports to the US should be set aside. So too

should claims that previous US administrations had not taken extensive measures to

limit Chinese commercial opportunities in the US market place. This is not to equate

the height of the trade distortions affecting Chinese exports before and after 2018.

The comparable analysis of the stock of trade distortions facing US exports is presented

in Figure 4. Coincidentally, only 30% of US exports to China did not face a policy-

induced trade distortion before the tariff hikes of 2018. After those hikes the percentage

of unfettered US exports fell to 8%, implying that the Sino-US trade tensions have

reduced the degree of unfettered US market access to the Chinese markets more than

in the opposite direction. Figures 3 and 4 imply there was plenty of scope for both

protagonists to reduce obstacles to the other’s exports, should they decide to make the

most of the negotiations launched after the last G20 Leaders’ Summit.


80

Figure 4 After last year’s Chinese tariff hikes, less than 8% of US exports to China

competed on a level playing field

0.697 0.708

0.927

0

25

50

75

100

125

150

0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00

Obama II 2017 2018Period

US

expo

rts a

ffect

ed (b

illion

US

Dol

lars

)Share of U

S exports affected


The Sino-US ‘tariff war’ against the backdrop of creeping covert global protectionism

Further context can be provided by comparing the amount of bilateral goods trade

covered by recent US-Chinese tariff increases with those covered by various trade

distortions imposed worldwide over the past decade. Given the former trade tensions

have not, fortunately, resulted in other countries raising trade barriers on anything like

the scale of China or the US, then it is possible to assess the global significance of this

spat. Could the US-China tariff hikes be a drop in the bucket in the ongoing resort to

trade distortions by governments?

To fix ideas, we created an index of the total value of trade flows affected by different

bilateral and global trade policy developments. Throughout we set that index to 100

for the total value of Chinese and US goods exports facing tariff increases imposed

by the other in 2018. Figure 5 compares the total amount of bilateral Sino-US goods



81

exports facing tariff increases imposed by the other for the years since 2009. Noting

that the vertical axis in Figure 5 uses a logarithmic scale, we confirm that 2018 involved

an unusually large amount of goods exports affected by US tariff increases targeting

China, and vice versa. This amount is then compared to the value of exports facing tariff

hikes from any exporter, not just the US or China, shown by the light blue line. The

latter line also spikes in 2014, the year when EU tariff preferences for Chinese exports

were withdrawn. Other jurisdictions, then, have targeted Chinese exports on a wide

scale but less brazenly.

Figure 5 In 2018 three-quarters of trade facing new import distortions had nothing

to do with the Sino-US bilateral tariff hikes

119

4758

163142

257 249

100

154181

443

222

360421

833

558643

387338

458

1

10

100

1000

1

10

100

1000

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Year

Tota

l val

ue o

f tra

de a

ffect

ed (i

ndex

ed a

t 10

0 fo

r the

tota

l val

ue o

f tra

de a

ffect

ed

by U

S−C

hina

tarif

f hike

s in

201

8)

Total value of trade affected (indexed at 100 for the total value of trade affected

by US−C

hina tariff hikes in 2018)

US and China bilateral tariff hikesAll tariff hikes hurting a single nation

All tariff hikesAll import restrictions



82

The total amount of exports affected by Sino-US tariff hikes (the dark blue line) pales

into significance when compared to the amount of global exports affected by tariff

increases of all types worldwide (the dark brown line) or the amount of global exports

affected by a host of import distortions6 (the light brown line) in the decade since 2009.

In 2018 the total amount of exports affected by Sino-US trade tensions amounted to

less than 22% of the worldwide goods trade last year that faced some type of trade

distortion in the importing jurisdiction. By focusing on the brazen protectionism of the

Trump Administration in 2018 and Chinese retaliation, have trade policy analysts fallen

for the trap of misdirection, that is, failing to spot more far-reaching commercial policy

developments? And this discussion has focused on distortions to imports – over the past

ten years, policies to goose exports have covered larger amounts of trade (Evenett and

Fritz 2018).

Concluding remarks

In light of the statistics presented in this chapter, what is the practical and intellectual

significance of the Sino-US tariff hikes of 2018? As a practical matter, the uncertainty

engendered by these trade tensions – in particular, the fear that these tensions may

spread and draw in other nations – is likely to have had a larger economic impact that

the direct restrictive effect on international trade. For all the US’ and China’s heft, more

than 95% of world trade takes place between other nations.

The intellectual significance of scaling the 2018 Sino-US tariff increases is two-fold.

First, it begs the question of what actions constitute a trade war. Do bilateral tariff

hikes constitute a trade war even if they only affect a small percentage of world trade?

What about non-tariff distortions to trade? Clarity about definition is required before

modelling can proceed.

6 Strictly speaking, the import distortions taken into account here are import tariff increases (including those associated

with trade defence and safeguard actions), import quotas, and subsidies to import-competing farmers and manufacturers

(that bolster their market shares), local content requirements, and buy local government procurement provisions. The

statistics presented in Figure 5 therefore do not reflect the imposition of technical barriers to trade and sanitary and

phytosanitary standards, which would likely significantly increase the trade covered.



83

Second, to what extent has our understanding of trade wars been skewed by an excessive

focus on sharp changes in the more transparent trade policies? Have analysts given too

much weight to the brazen protectionism of the Trump administration and overlooked

other, larger policy-induced trade distortions? Doing so may skew the assessment of the

effectiveness of the current trading rules in reining in protectionism. Or are statements

such as that by Wilbur Ross, US Secretary of Commerce, that “trade wars are fought

every single day”7 better characterisations of contemporary trade policy dynamics in an

era of profound geopolitical and technological shifts? In which case, the Sino-US tariff

hikes of 2018 could be the latest chapter in an increasingly distorted, yet nominally

open, world trading system.

References

Evenett, S J and J Fritz (2018), Brazen Unilateralism: The US-China Trade War in

Perspective, The 23rd Global Trade Alert report, CEPR Press.

Fitzkee, D (1975), Magic by Misdirection, Magic Limited.

About the authors

Simon J. Evenett is Professor of International Trade and Economic Development,

University of St. Gallen, Research Fellow of CEPR, and Coordinator of the Global

Trade Alert.

Johannes Fritz is Max Schmidheiny Foundation Research Fellow at the University of

St.Gallen’s Swiss Institute for International Economics. He manages the Global Trade

Alert initiative under the coordination of Prof. Simon Evenett.

7 Statement made at the World Economic Forum in January 2018.

https://www.globaltradealert.org/reports/45

https://www.globaltradealert.org/reports/45

85

9 The never-ending story: The puzzle of subsidies

Luca RubiniUniversity of Birmingham

‘Controversy’ is the word

Subsidies have long constituted a policy and legal puzzle. Governments have always

subsidised sectors and industries in their economies. Special interests loathe foreign

public support going to competitors, but then lobby their governments to receive the

same (or greater) assistance at home. Even on an ideological level, one has always

found a confrontation between those who favour subsidisation and those who despise it

(Hufbauer and Shelton-Erb 1984).

Subsidies are one of the most contentious policy measures at the disposal of

governments. Unlike tariffs or quotas, the policy objectives pursued may be mixed

(for example, supporting green energy and boosting local industry and jobs). Effects

are also mixed, with positives and negatives being produced and, in an increasingly

globalised economy, with spillovers often crossing national borders. At the same time,

subsidies are more visible and their effects on certain sectors and industries are often

felt more immediately and directly than those of other important domestic policies,

such as general taxation or regulation, thus generating a particular attraction for lobbies

and special interests. It is therefore reasonable to believe that, in addition to being

tools to deal with spillovers, governments may have often welcomed international rules

governing subsidies as offering them the ‘excuse’ to resist domestic lobbies and pursue

rational policies (Bishop 2005, Krugman 2018).


86

Since the late 1800s, the need to arbitrate these measures at the international level been

a key question for international law.1 Rules regulating subsidies and countervailing

measures were present in the GATT 1947 and were increasingly elaborated through

the Tokyo Round Subsidy Code in the 1970s and the Uruguay Round in the 1980s

and 1990s. In a recent analysis of more than 280 preferential trade agreements (PTAs)

signed between 1956 and 2016 (Rubini 2019), I show that subsidy provisions represent

one of the standard chapters of trade regulation (being present in 95% of all PTAs).

But, despite this great wealth of regulation, many issues are still left wide open. From

the international perspective, the biggest puzzle is how to create rules that manage to

balance positives and negatives, especially where losers and winners from subsidisation

are in different countries. How can a transnational trade-off be made and incorporated

into a legal framework? And, even before distinguishing the good from the bad, it is

necessary to pinpoint in legal language what a subsidy is, which is, to this day, an

elusive task. It is a fact that many policy measures may cause the effects of a subsidy,

that is, give economic advantages to firms and sectors. What is a subsidy? What is a

state aid? How and where does one draw the line? What should be regulated and what

should not?2

These questions encapsulate the dilemmas that have agitated subsidy regulation for

years. Clearly, these questions are not only technical, but often normative and always

political, inasmuch as they touch the constitutional core of state sovereignty in economic,

political, and social matters. It is this possibility that makes each stage of law-making

(negotiation, drafting, interpretation, and application) in the area of subsidies terribly

sensitive. Multiple actors, and multiple forces, at various levels have always been at

work in the attempt to mould subsidy laws (Rubini and Hawkins 2016).

The deep root of this contentiousness was expressed in masterly fashion by the late

Robert Hudec when he noted that:

1 One can immediately think of the 1902 Brussels Sugar Convention, which dealt with subsidies to sugar and created the

first modern international trade institution (Fahkri 2014). An historical overview of the regulation of subsidy and state

aid laws can be found in Rubini and Hawkins (2016).

2 A comparative analysis of the key question of the notion of subsidy in the WTO and in the EU can be found in Rubini

(2009). Sykes (2010) advances that many of these questions are inherently intractable from a regulatory perspective.

The never-ending story: The puzzle of subsidies

Luca Rubini

87

“the political perception is primarily a matter of visibility. Once the helping hand of

government becomes conspicuous, it tends to elicit “subsidy” objections no matter

what form the help takes” (Hudec 1996).

After several decades of research and practice, there are more questions than answers.

And, with the increasing complexity of policy measures that produce subsidy-like

effects, finding answers to these questions is becoming more and more difficult. In this

scenario, enforcers and adjudicators are increasingly struggling, and the examples of

contradictory and conflicting interpretations are growing in number and importance.

Legal certainty and security are becoming elusive. Laws are tested to their limits,

and their capacity to regulate current and future challenges is put into question. Their

responsiveness to fundamental acts of re-orientation is unclear. Calls for law reform are

growing. But the pervasive, almost proverbial, lack of clarity in the area, as well as its

sensitivity, have always represented fundamental obstacles to any serious attempt for

change.

Current tensions: Do WTO subsidy laws bite?

Subsidies have hit the headlines more and more in recent times. In the EU, the European

Commission is controversially using state aid control to tackle tax avoidance practices

of prominent multinational companies such as Amazon, Fiat, Starbucks, Apple, and

McDonald’s.3 But do these tax rulings really constitute state aid? Do they really distort

competition? And more fundamentally, is EU state aid control the right political and

legal tool to tackle tax avoidance?

In the WTO, litigation on European and US support to Airbus and Boeing has put

pressure on the dispute settlement system with the longest disputes in WTO history,

running since 2004.4 At the time of writing, retaliation by both sides is a distinct

possibility. With the US already saying they want to impose around $11billion a year in

tariffs and the EU likely to follow suit, one wonders whether a settlement is on its way

(Hufbauer et al. 2009).

3 “Margrethe Vestager: We are doing this because people are angry”, The Guardian, 17 September 2017.

4 “WTO rules US failed to stop unfair tax breaks to Boeing”, Financial Times, 28 March 2019.


88

At the same time, the organs of WTO dispute settlement, and in particular the Appellate

Body, have come out with decisions interpreting the definition of subsidy which have

been quite controversial (Rubini 2017). For example, in the United States – ADs and

CVDs on Certain Products from China (DS 379) decision of 2013, the Appellate Body

produced an interpretation of the expression ‘public body’ which many have considered

too restrictive, with the result of making it more difficult for the rules to catch many

subsidy practices (Cartland et al. 2012, Pauwelyn 2013). Similarly, in the Canada –

Renewable Energy dispute (DS 412 and 426), the adjudicating bodies controversially

concluded that a very common policy supporting green energy – a feed-in tariff – was

not a subsidy. Commentators imputed the adjudicators as indulging in “legal acrobatics”

(Mavroidis and Cosbey 2014). Neglecting the arguably clear language of the law, a split

panel (with one member dissenting) and the Appellate Body were at pains to conclude

that this was not a subsidy (Rubini 2014).

At the same time, following the Appellate Body rulings in the EC – Large Civil Aircraft

(DS 316) and US – Tax Incentives (DS 487) disputes, the test to prove that certain

subsidies are prohibited is particularly demanding. Another example is the particularly

narrow interpretation of the remedy for those subsidies that have been found to be

illegal (technically, ‘actionable’) which was handed down by the Appellate Body in

the 2018 report in the EC – Large Civil Aircraft implementation proceedings. Now,

crucially, some claim that the combined effect of these decisions may be that current

WTO subsidy disciplines are unduly under-inclusive. In other words, so the argument

goes, WTO subsidy laws do not bite as they should.

The challenge of the emergence of China and law reform talk

The claim of insufficiency of the current WTO subsidy laws is heightened by the recent

emergence of China as a world-leading trade power and by the difficulty of interfacing

its huge state-led economy with other largely market-oriented economic systems (Wu

2016). The multilateral rules on subsidies, and their ability to regulate state capitalism,

state subsidies and state-owned Enterprises (SOEs), is increasingly put into question.


Luca Rubini

89

In March 2018, President Trump signed the first order imposing tariffs on several

steel and aluminium products imported from various countries. In a toxic escalation,

many other similar orders have followed. Counter-measures have been taken and

several disputes are currently being heard in the WTO. A veritable ‘trade war’ has

emerged (Irwin 2017, Krugman 2018). The target of the US action is China and its

unfair practices that allegedly give its exports unfair advantages. To be sure, action

against allegedly unfairly subsidised or dumped imports from China is not new (Bown

2018). What differentiates the current measures from previous trade remedies is their

magnitude – and the rhetoric supporting it. Protectionism is now not only practiced but

preached.

The US is not, however, the only one to raise claims on China. There is a degree of

consensus among several countries that the integration of the Chinese model into the

world trading system is becoming increasingly difficult and that action should be taken

(Wu 2016). Talk of law reform addressing many of the underlying issues of these trade

conflicts started to emerge in 2018. In May, the US, the EU, and Japan announced their

willingness to start negotiations on subsidy and SOE rules soon.5 Similar initiatives

have been started by the EU6 and by Canada which spearheaded a group of 13 countries

known as the ‘Ottawa group’.7 Though the scope of the suggested reform is broader, the

need to update subsidy and SOE rules is a common denominator.8

An initial draft text on subsidy disciplines produced by the US, EU, and Japanese

‘trilateral’ may come out as early as in the Spring of 2019. What one should expect is

a tightening of the current rules, with a more extensive list of prohibited subsidies, and

possibly few clarifications of the law as it is now (for example, on the criteria of a ‘public

body’). Transparency is a key chapter of any reform of WTO subsidy rules (Wolfe and

Collins-Williams 2010) and much of the value of any reform will be assessed against

5 “Joint Statement on Trilateral Meeting of the Trade Ministers of the United States, Japan, and the European Union”, 31

May 2018.

6 “WTO – EU’s proposals on WTO modernization”, European Commission, 5 July 2018.

7 “Joint Communiqué of the Ottawa Ministerial on WTO Reform”, 25 October 2018. China responded to these initiatives

on 20 December with a position paper (“China’s position paper on WTO reform”).

8 It should also be noted that new disciplines on fisheries subsidies may emerge soon (see www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/

rulesneg_e/fish_e/fish_e.htm).

http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/rulesneg_e/fish_e/fish_e.htm

http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/rulesneg_e/fish_e/fish_e.htm


90

the objective of achieving better transparency of subsidisation measures.9 Finally, as

many argue, a balanced subsidy discipline should also incorporate the principle that

many subsidies (think of measures supporting the fight against climate change) are

positive and should hence be legitimate,10 which may, however, be a difficult point to

agree on.

References

Bertelsmann Stiftung (2018), Revitalizing Multilateral Governance at the World Trade

Organization, Report of the High-Level Board of Experts on the Future of Global Trade

Governance.

Bishop, B (2005), “From Trade to Tutelage: State Aid and Public Choice in the European

Union”, presentation to Conference to ACE, Copenhagen, 2 December.

Bown, C (2018), “Testimony before the US – China Economic and Security Review

Commission – Hearing on US tools to address Chinese market distortions”, 8 June.

Cartland, M, G Depayre and J Woznowski (2012), “Is Something Going Wrong in the

WTO Dispute Settlement?’, Journal of World Trade 46(5): 979

Fakhri, M (2014), Sugar and the Making of International Trade, Cambridge University

Press.

Krugman, P (2018), “Oh, What a Trumpy Trade War!”, The New York Times, 8 March.

Hoekman, B (2015), “Subsidies and Spillovers in a Value Chain World: New Rules

Required?”, The E15 Initiative, July.

9 The claim that not many countries notify their subsidies to the WTO, or that they do not do so consistently or

appropriately, is common (see, for example, “Subsidies Committee members express concerns on lack of notifications”,

WTO Committee on Subsidies, 23 October 2018). The US, EU, and Japanese trilateral supported a proposal which has

been presented in various iterations in the WTO by nine countries (the latest one was on 1 April 2019) and which is based

on a ‘name-and-shame’ mechanism.

10 Various policy initiatives have recently addressed the issue of the reform of subsidy laws, the most notable being the

E15 Initiative (www.e15initiative.org) organised by the ICTSD and the World Economic Forum (Rubini 2015, Hoekman

2015, Shaffer et al. 2015, Horlick and Clarke 2016); see also the initiative of Bertelsmann Stiftung (2018).

http://www.e15initiative.org


Luca Rubini

91

Horlick, G and P Clarke (2016), “Rethinking subsidy disciplines for the future”, E15

Task Force on Rethinking International Disciplines Policy Options Paper.

Hudec, R (1996), “Difference in National Environmental Standards: The Level-Playing-

Field Dimension”, 5 Minn. Journal of Global Trade 1, 15.

Hufbauer, G and J Shelton-Erb (1984), Subsidies in International Trade, MIT Press.

Hufbauer, G, L Rubini and Y Wong (2009), “Swamped by Subsidies: Averting a US–

EU Trade War after the Great Crisis”, Policy Note, 24 July.

Irwin, D (2017), “Mr Trump’s Trade War”, The Wall Street Journal, 15 December.

Mavroidis, P and A Cosbey (2014), “A Turquoise Mess: Green Subsidies, Blue Industrial

Policy and Renewable Energy: The Case for Redrafting the Subsidies Agreement of the

WTO”, Journal of International Economic Law 17(1): 11-47.

Pauwelyn, J (2013), “Treaty Interpretation or Activism? Comment on the AB Report on

United States – ADs and CVDs on Certain Products from China”, World Trade Review

12(2): 235-241.

Rubini, L (2009), The Definition of Subsidy and State Aid: WTO and EC Law in

Comparative Perspective, Oxford University Press.

Rubini, L (2015), “Rethinking International Subsidies Disciplines: Rationale and

Possible Avenues for Reform”, Overview Paper, E15 Task Force on Rethinking

International Subsidies Discipline.

Rubini, L and J Hawkins (2016), What Shapes the Law? Reflections on the History,

Law, Politics and Economics of International and European Subsidy Disciplines,

Global Governance Program, European University Institute.

Rubini, L (2017), “The Age of Innocence. The evolution of the case-law of the WTO

dispute settlement. Subsidies as case-study”, in M Elsig, B Hoekman, and J Pauwelyn

(eds) Assessing the World Trade Organization. Fit for Purpose?, Cambridge University

Press, pp. 276-317.


92

Rubini, L (2019), “The regulation of subsidies in Preferential Trade Agreements”,

forthcoming in A Mattoo, N Rocha and M Ruta (eds), World Bank Handbook of Deep

Integration Trade Agreements.

Shaffer, G, R Wolfe and V Le (2015), “Informal Law’s Discipline of Subsidies:

Variation in Definitions, Obligations, Transparency, and Organizations”, Think Piece,

The E15 Initiative.

Sykes, A (2010), “The questionable case of subsidy regulation: a comparative

perspective”, Journal of Legal Analysis 2(2): 473-523.

Wolfe, R and T Collins-Williams (2010), “Transparency as a trade policy tool: the

WTO’s cloudy windows”, World Trade Review 9(4): 551-581


International Law Journal 57: 1001-1063.

About the author

Luca Rubini is a trade and competition lawyer, with a special interest in the regulation

of the state intervention in the economy. He is a Reader in International Economic

Law in the School of Law of the University of Birmingham, in the UK. Previously, he

was lecturer at the University of Leicester and before that legal secretary to Sir Francis

Jacobs QC, Advocate General at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Luca

had held visiting positions in various academic institutions in the UK, US, Switzerland

and Italy, including at King’s College London, the Institute of International Economic

Law (Georgetown University), the European University Institute, Bocconi University

and the World Trade Institute (University of Berne). He is fellow of the Centre of

European Law, King’s College London, and visiting professor at the Freie Universitat

in Berlin and at the World Trade Institute, MILE programme in Bern. In the 2012-

13 academic year, he was a Robert Schuman Senior Research Fellow at the Global

Governance Programme (GGP) of the European University Institute. Luca has law

degrees from the Catholic University in Milan (JD) and King’s College London (MA

and PhD) and is admitted to the Bar in Italy and to the Law Society of England and

Wales as solicitor (non-practising). Luca is the author of the first theoretical analysis


Luca Rubini

93

of the definition of subsidy in the WTO and EU (Oxford University Press 2009) which

is currently being translated in Chinese. More recently, he has extended his focus from

subsidy law and policy to the analysis of the various linkages between energy, trade

and climate change, to the regulation of state capitalism in international and European

law, and to the historical analysis of the regulation of subsidies in the 20th and 21st

centuries.

95

10 The policy uncertainty aftershocks of trade wars and trade tensions

Kyle Handley and Nuno LimãoUniversity of Michigan; University of Maryland

The current era of globalisation was built on rules-based institutions founded partly

as a response to the economic protectionism of the 1930s. The current spate of trade

wars and renegotiations of agreements threatens a new era of protectionism; or at a

minimum, an erosion of the credibility of long-standing bilateral and multilateral policy

commitments that have been essential for trade growth.

The threat of trade wars during the Great Recession, the current trade war between the

US and China, and the vote in 2016 for the UK to leave the EU are clear examples of

rising tensions between major economies and the dissatisfaction of many voters with

the outcomes of globalisation. The Trump administration has also used the threat of

tariffs to cajole Mexico, Canada, and others into renegotiating trade agreements such

as NAFTA, threatened to leave the WTO, and imposed across-the-board tariffs on

steel and aluminium. Tit-for-tat retaliation has resulted in higher tariffs on US exports

of sorghum, Maine lobster, blue jeans, and heavy weight motorcycles produced by

Harley-Davidson, among other products.

The rise in trade barriers, as applied, is troubling. But the major casualty of recent

tensions is perhaps the credibility of the rules-based trading system. The benefits of

a commitment to openness were recognised in 1920 by John Maynard Keynes, who

described the internationalisation of early 20th century commerce thus:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed,

the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and

reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.


96

Fully realising such gains was contingent on the belief of consumers and business that

a commitment to openness was normal. Keynes continued:

[...] most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and

permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from

it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism

and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and

exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the

amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence

at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of

which was nearly complete in practice.

Keynes’ writing would have applied just as well in 2007, just before the global financial

crisis raised the prospect of trade wars for the first time since the 1930s. During the nadir

of the crisis, G20 leaders repeatedly pledged that that they “will not repeat the historic

mistakes of protectionism of previous eras”.1 But only a decade later, commitments to

multilateralism and the rejection of trade restrictions have been excised from the latest

G20 joint statements.2

Recent research shows that one reason trade agreements are valuable to exporters is that

they include commitments to stable, predictable trade policy regimes that encourage

export investment and trade participation. Threats to exit trade agreements or start

trade wars as a pretence to renegotiate agreements weaken their credibility as insurance

against protectionism.

A negotiated settlement between the US and China, or between the UK and the EU,

may yet be achieved. But the cost may be a new era defined by a higher probability

that agreements will be broken or will lack credible enforcement, a situation we define

as a trade cold war. This type of policy uncertainty reduces investment and trade – as

Graziano et al. (2018) and Crowley et al. (2019) find for trade between the EU and

the UK around the Brexit referendum – even before any trade policy has changed.

In the US, the actions of the Trump administration have exacerbated existing sources

1 “Statement Issued by the G20 Leaders,” 2 April 2009.

2 “G20 Leaders' Declaration: Building Consensus for Fair and Sustainable Development,” 1 December 2018.

http://www.g20.utoronto.ca/2009/2009communique0402.html



http://www.g20.utoronto.ca/2018/2018-leaders-declaration.html

The policy uncertainty aftershocks of trade wars and trade tensions

Kyle Handley and Nuno Limão

97

of trade policy uncertainty or generated new risks (Handley and Limão 2017b). For

example, the US withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and imposed new tariffs

on a variety of countries and products. Even after renegotiating trade deals with Korea,

Canada, and Mexico, punitive tariffs on aluminium and steel remain in place.

Research by Carballo et al. (2018) finds that trade agreements can be particularly

valuable as an insurance mechanism during downturns, when protection tends to increase

(Bown and Crowley 2013). NAFTA, the EU, and the WTO provide governments with

a commitment device so their response to economic and political pressures during

downturns is measured and predictable. We find that while the interaction of economic

and policy uncertainty exacerbated the reduction in US firms’ exports in the 2008 crisis,

it did so much less for exports to NAFTA and other preferential partners. In short,

preferential trade agreements provided insurance; trade relationships between countries

with credible trade agreements were more durable and resilient. This is good for the

exporting firms, but also for their suppliers and employees.

Agreements are valuable in reducing trade policy uncertainty even in the absence of

economic crises. There is increasing evidence of the export effects of major agreements

via reductions of uncertainty, here we briefly describe two: Portugal’s accession to the

EU in 1986, and China’s accession to the WTO in late 2001.

In Handley and Limão (2015), we treat Portugal’s accession to the EU as a policy

uncertainty shock. Prior to membership, the EU already provided some tariff preferences

to Portuguese exporters, but we find evidence that those firms viewed those preferences

as uncertain until 1986, when Portugal joined the EU. A substantial share of the trade

growth experienced immediately post accession was generated by eliminating that

source of trade policy uncertainty. The effects of the threat of Brexit in reducing trade

between the EU and the UK found by Graziano et al. (2018) reflects, to some extent,

the reversal of that process for the UK.

During the 1990s, China was at risk of losing its most-favoured nation (MFN) status

with the US and facing tariffs of 30% on average. When China joined the WTO, the

US granted it permanent, unconditional MFN status and removed this source of policy

uncertainty. Our results in Handley and Limão (2017a) show that about one third of the

observed US import growth from China from 2000 to 2005 was due to this reduction

in trade policy uncertainty, which was equivalent to a five percentage point reduction


98

in applied tariffs. This translated into large import price reductions and US consumer

welfare gains of about 0.5%.3

The model and findings from China’s WTO accession can also be used to quantify the

effect of a US threat to raise tariffs by 25% or more on all its trade partners, which is not

far from the current state of affairs. If such a threat persists, it is predicted to increase

US prices by more than 2%, or about one third of the impact of completely shutting

down imports. Our estimates also imply that the predecessor to the WTO , the General

Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), realised substantial welfare gains from

trade by reducing the probability of a large-scale trade war. In a series of predictable,

permanent commitments through the GATT, and later the WTO, the US liberalised

tariffs from their post-WWII levels of around 22% to current levels.

The lesson for policymakers and trade negotiators is that credible, permanent trade

agreements have delivered a marketplace where residents of the US and UK can expect

to have all the products of world delivered to their doorstep at the click of mouse.

Domestic and foreign businesses, many of which depend directly or indirectly on

global supply chains, will continue investing to meet that demand if the international

trade policy regime is certain and permanent. A trade cold war with an ever-present risk

of higher tariffs is an unwelcome alternative that will both reduce trade and welfare and

leave trade relationships more vulnerable in the next economic downturn.

References

Amiti, M, M Dai, R C Feenstra and J Romalis (2017), “How Did China’s WTO Entry

Benefit U.S. Consumers?,” NBER Working Paper 23487.

Bown, C P and M A Crowley (2013), “Import protection, business cycles, and exchange

rates: Evidence from the Great Recession”, Journal of International Economics 90(1):

50–64.

3 Recent work has also applied our approach to China's WTO accession and confirmed our findings with more detailed

data. Accession led to export entry of Chinese firms (Feng et al. 2017) and a reduction in US prices (Amiti et al. 2018).

The policy uncertainty aftershocks of trade wars and trade tensions

Kyle Handley and Nuno Limão

99

Carballo, J, K Handley, and N Limão (2018), “Economic and Policy Uncertainty:

Export Dynamics and the Value of Agreements”, NBER Working Paper 24368.

Crowley, M, O Exton, and L Han (2019), “Renegotiation of Trade Agreements and

Firm Exporting Decisions: Evidence from the Impact of Brexit on UK Exports”, CEPR

Discussion Paper 13446.

Feng, L, Z Li and D Swenson (2017), “Trade policy uncertainty and exports: Evidence

from China’s WTO accession”, Journal of International Economics 106(C): 20–36.

Graziano, A, K Handley, and N Limao (2017) “Brexit Uncertainty and Trade

Disintegration”, NBER Working Paper 25334.

Handley, K and N Limão (2015), “Trade and Investment under Policy Uncertainty:

Theory and Firm Evidence”, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 7(4): 189-

222.

Handley, K and N Limão (2017a), “Policy Uncertainty, Trade, and Welfare: Theory

and Evidence for China and the United States”, American Economic Review 107(9):

2731–83.

Handley, K, and N Limão (2017b), “Trade under T.R.U.M.P. policies”, in C P Bown

(ed.), Economics and Policy in the Age of Trump, CEPR Press.

Keynes, J M (1920), The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Harcourt, Brace, and

Howe.

About the authors

Kyle Handley is an Associate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the

University of Michigan Ross School of Business and a Faculty Research Fellow of the

NBER. He has previously worked at Stanford University and the U.S. Census Bureau.

His work focuses on international trade, policy uncertainty, and firm dynamics. He was

the 2011 recipient of the WTO Young Trade Economist Essay Award. He received his

Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin,

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~limao/w25334.pdf

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~limao/w25334.pdf

https://voxeu.org/content/economics-and-policy-age-trump


100

his Master’s in Economics from the London School of Economics, and his PhD in

Economics from the University of Maryland.

Nuno Limão is a Professor at the University of Maryland Economics Department

and a Research Associate of the NBER and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

Professor Limão received his Bachelor’s degree from the London School of Economics

and his PhD from Columbia University. Nuno’s primary research and teaching interests

are in international trade, trade policy, and political economy. His research integrates

theoretical and empirical work to examine a variety of issues, such as how governments

choose among redistribution policies, the determinants of trade policy and trade

agreements, the interaction between preferential and multilateral trade liberalisation,

the effects of trade costs and geographic location. His recent work focuses on the effects

of policy uncertainty on firm decisions and its implications.

101

11 China’s rise and the growing doubts over trade multilateralism

Mark WuHarvard Law School

China’s impressive economic and technological rise in the early 21st century is

unprecedented in modern times. For one, it marks the first time in the postwar era

that the world’s leading trade power has embraced an economic and political model

different than the traditional liberal democratic, market-oriented model associated

with industrialised nations. While the world trading system has never mandated that

countries within the regime conform to any economic model per se, the postwar global

trade regime has always been led by countries within the Western security alliance, with

the US at its fore. China, however, has sought to chart out its own path.

Instead of separating the organs of a political party from those of the state and firms,

China’s leaders have experimented with a model in which the Communist Party remains

deeply enshrined at the core of how both the polity and the market are governed. At the

same time, the Party itself has adapted. Compared to a generation ago, there is much

greater latitude for private enterprise, market forces, individual choice, and mobility

in contemporary China. What has emerged is a unique economic system that I and

others have termed ‘China, Inc.’ It is fundamentally different than other forms of state

capitalism, corporatism, or conglomerate-led economies.

This gives rise to a paradox. The world has benefited tremendously from the economic

opportunities stemming from the past four decades of China’s rise. It can envision many

more mutually beneficial ‘win-win’ scenarios. Common problems such as climate

change and global health pandemics require close cooperation. Yet, at the same time,

the world remains deeply anxious about China’s ultimate motivations. Is China truly

seeking a peaceful rise, as its leaders assert? Or is it a revisionist power, out to reshape

territorial boundaries, global institutions, and/or human rights norms?


102

For decades, Western business and political leaders have focused primarily on mutually

beneficial opportunities while sidestepping their anxieties. The hope was that by

embedding China within a rules-based trading system anchored by the WTO, this would

create sufficiently large incentives for the country to remain onboard as a cooperative

partner to the Western alliance instead of veering off track to become a revisionist,

strategic rival.

For a multitude of reasons, this hope has shattered over the last few years. Especially

in the US, but also elsewhere, there is growing concern over China’s rise. Military

leaders bemoan growing Chinese assertiveness, whether in the South China Sea or

cyberspace. Business leaders worry that subsidies, regulatory restrictions, and implicit

technology transfer demands will advantage their Chinese competitors unfairly. Human

rights leaders warn that China’s growing economic and technological prowess will fuel

a dystopian future, holding out the treatment of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang as proof.

None of these developments has anything to do with the WTO. Yet, in aggregate, they

fuel a growing debate over whether a rules-based global trading system can constrain

the anxieties associated with a rising China led by authoritarian leaders. After some

debate, the Trump administration concluded that it cannot, leading the US to embrace

unilateral tariffs as its preferred means of leverage.

While other countries may share some of the US’ concerns, many disagree with its

approach. However, they struggle to offer a convincing alternative to the extremes of

confrontation versus patient constructive engagement. Fissures are emerging within

the Western alliance. Should countries accept recent events in China as a mere hiccup

against positive long-term trends? If not, what means exist, besides unilateral tariffs,

to exert effective pressure for change? Should they turn away from multilateralism

toward plurilateral and regional alternatives instead? If so, given China’s size, why

would those alternatives prove effective in cajoling China’s leaders toward reducing

Party interference in the market? Or have the Americans correctly assessed that China

is unlikely to accept changes without concerted pressure? If so, is it worth the risk of

threatening to abandon trade multilateralism in an attempt to save it?

Such questions will feature prominently in the trade and geopolitical debates of the

coming decade. In this chapter I assess the economic challenges associated a rising

China’s rise and the growing doubts over trade multilateralism

Mark Wu

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China. I explain how China’s economic structure differs from others, why WTO dispute

settlement has proven ineffective in dealing with the problems that arise out of it, and

the debate over how and whether trade multilateralism can adapt in light of the China

challenge.

What is ‘China, Inc.’?

In a previous piece (Wu 2016), I argued that China’s economic system is a unique

product of its economic and political history. One mistake is to think of its form as a

variation on a theme rather than accept it as sui generis. Another is to think of its form

as fixed. China’s leaders are constantly experimenting and tweaking, with the hopes of

improving their governance model. Indeed, the Chinese economic system has been, and

will likely remain, the world’s most dynamic for the foreseeable future.

What makes this system unique? In my 2016 article, I identified six salient features.

Even in the three years hence, some of the specific elements associated with each

feature have altered – yet another sign of the dynamism of ‘China, Inc.’ Nevertheless,

the major features remain the same. They include the following:

1. A powerful entity known as the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration

Commission (SASAC), that allows the Party-state to retain control over the

‘commanding heights’ of the Chinese economy (aerospace, aviation, chemicals,

energy, metals, minerals, nuclear, petroleum, power, railway, steel, shipbuilding,

telecommunications, etc.) while relying upon signals from market mechanisms.

2. Various financial entities that permit the Party-state to control China’s largest banks

and thereby direct its financial resources, while still injecting elements of market-

based competition.

3. Entities within the Party, such as the Central Financial and Economic Affairs

Commission, as well as within the state, such as the National Development and

Reform Commission, that provide guidance and coordination across government

agencies and firms.


104

4. Nimble, informal networks between entities in industry sectors that are smaller in

scale than the conglomerate structures in Japan or South Korea, but nevertheless

facilitate coordination.

5. The Party’s Organization bureau, which sets individual performance metrics and

directly controls personnel appointments within the government, largest state-

controlled firms, banks, research institutions, and so on, thereby incentivising

officials, board members, and senior managers to act in line with Party interests.

6. Formal and informal linkages between the Party and private enterprises, including

possibly minority equity holdings as well as the establishment of Party cells within

companies.

While one or more of these features may exist in another state capitalist, corporatist, or

post-transition economy, no other country has all six. Yet, it is the combination of these

six features that matters. They give rise to an economy where the Communist Party

is able to retain overall control while still taking advantage of the benefits of market

mechanisms and competition. This guards against the negative risks associated with

inefficient rent-seeking by oligarchs and Party apparatchiks. It also enhances the ability

of Party leaders to adjust economic and social policies to deal with market failures and

negative market externalities, provided the technocrats are able to properly identify

them.

China’s leaders will continue to tweak the elements of ‘China, Inc.’ to improve its

performance, but in the near term, they are unlikely to abandon this overall economic

structure, lest the Party risks its political control and its ability to deliver on the economic

goals required to rejuvenate the Chinese nation.

How is ‘China, Inc.’ different than past economic competitors?

The notion of a rising trade power with an economic structure different than incumbent

powers is not new. Complaints over its closed markets, industrial policy, subsidies, and

weak intellectual property protection are also not new. However, ‘China, Inc.’ differs

from ‘Japan, Inc.’ and other historical antecedents in fundamentally different ways.


Mark Wu

105

The most obvious difference is its size and scale. Analysts predict that China’s economy

will surpass that of the US to become the world’s largest at some point in the next two

decades (Pricewaterhouse Coopers 2017, Henry 2018). Even if its growth stutters, its

different economic system will continue to cast long shadows on global trade. Already,

China is the top trade partner for most countries in East and Southeast Asia, as well as

Australia and several countries in Africa and Latin America (WTO 2019).

A second difference is in its organisational structure. While other governments also

have close ties with industry, these ties normally run through the state. In China,

ultimate control runs through a political party, not the state. At no point did the Liberal

Democratic Party of Japan wield anything close to the same power as the Communist

Party in China in deciding who serves in senior management and on oversight boards

of major banks and industrial firms.

A third difference is geopolitical. China’s rise marks the first time that a developing

country and one outside of the Western alliance has claimed the mantle of the world’s

largest trading country. Even after four decades of sustained growth, the living standard

of a proportion of its population is more akin to those of Latin America, South Asia, or

parts of sub-Saharan African than North America, Western Europe, or Japan. China’s

continued status as a developing country affords it a larger pool of voting allies in

international organisations than other past rising powers.

Lastly, China’s rise poses larger spillover effects for ancillary, non-trade interests

involving the military and national security. These trigger outsized concerns that China’s

economic and technological rise may shift the balance of power and weaken the Western

security alliance. Because of its current primacy, the US is disproportionately affected

by these spillovers, as compared to other industrialised nations that have accepted their

diminished status as mid-sized powers dependent on the US’ security guarantees.

Why WTO dispute settlement has proven ineffective in dealing with the ‘China, Inc.’ challenge

The ongoing trade-related complaints extend both within and outside of China.

Internally, the Chinese market is more open than ever. Yet, because of the lurking shadow

of ‘China, Inc.’, foreign firms continue to perceive an uneven playing field where the


106

Party-state could reshape the terms of competition to their disadvantage. That’s not to

say that it always does. Part of China’s success to date has been its recognition of the

power of market forces, the importance of private enterprises, foreign investment, and

the need for competition to dictate broad outcomes.1 Interference is most evident in

technologically sensitive domains such as aerospace and semiconductors, where China

seeks to catch up and reduce its dependence on Western suppliers (USTR 2018, US

Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship 2019). It is also evident in sectors

where state-owned enterprises continue to play an outsized role, such as chemicals

and steel, or where there are possible spillover effects for social stability or military

applications, such as internet industries.2

Outside of China, the impact is felt broadly in sectors affected by industry downturns.

Without state-backed support, market-oriented firms accountable directly to shareholders

will need to respond immediately by cutting costs and reducing production. Chinese

firms, however, have greater leeway. Because of the entwined nature of ‘China, Inc.’,

the Party-state could decide to disperse the negative costs across a larger range of

players and over a broader period of time. It may do so for industrial policy or non-

economic reasons, such as limiting unemployment. Regardless, this has led to large-

scale Chinese overcapacity in various sectors, most notably steel and aluminium. The

adjustment costs are therefore borne disproportionately by foreign firms, while ‘China,

Inc.’ helps keep Chinese firms afloat.

Why then has the WTO proven incapable of dealing with these issues? Three major

problems require closer analysis.

The first problem is the incompleteness of the rules themselves. The last major updating

of global trade rules took place in 1994, at a time when the current form of ‘China, Inc.’

was largely unknown. The rules are adequate for issues where Chinese trade policies

resemble those of other Asian export-led economies or transition economies, such as

local content requirements, but they were not written with the ‘China, Inc.’ structure

1 For a comprehensive description of private market forces, rather than the state, drove growth for much of the reform era,

see Lardy (2014).

2 For an account of the growing importance of the state in the Xi era, see Lardy (2019).


Mark Wu

107

in mind. Nor have they been updated to deal with new, and increasingly important,

phenomenon such as digital trade and data protectionism arising out of an internet

economy with intensive state controls (Meltzer 2019, Janow and Mavroidis 2019).

Second, the WTO rules were written to discipline measures or actions enacted by

governments or actors directed or entrusted by governments. However, in the case of

‘China, Inc.’, often times the troubling action arises out of an informal understanding

that is not captured in any written, or possibly even spoken, form. There may not be

anything formally on paper requiring a foreign firm to enter into a joint venture or to

transfer certain technology, but through pattern recognition, foreign firms have come

to learn that there may be negative consequences for not doing so. Or there may not be

any formal direction requiring a Chinese bank to lend on preferential terms to a Chinese

enterprise in a priority sector, but a senior bank official knows implicitly that he ought to

do so, given that his future career prospects will be determined by Party officials. These

types of actions are difficult to challenge, given the lack of clear evidence necessary

to support a WTO case. Indeed, in the one major case that the US has brought on

intellectual property enforcement to date, the WTO ruled that US lawyers failed to offer

sufficient evidence to back up parts of their claim.3

Finally, even if the rules are clear and the evidence is sufficient to prevail in a legal

challenge, the nature of WTO remedies poses a third dilemma. Unlike other judicial

institutions, the WTO Dispute Settlement Body lacks the authority to issue retrospective

remedies for past harm. It can only authorise prospective damages in the event that the

losing party fails to bring its actions back in line with the law within a reasonable period

of time. This creates ample opportunity for governments to game the system by taking

advantage of the ‘free pass’ for breach prior to the conclusion of the dispute. This is

most effective in industries with high fixed costs and long product cycles, or where

supply chains are relatively ‘sticky’. Even when foreign governments have prevailed

against China at the WTO, the industrial policy underlying the illegal act may still

manage to accomplish much of its goals, as a result of this free pass.

3 See the Panel Report in China – Measures Affecting the Protection and Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights,

DS362.


108

The uncomfortable truths confronting trade multilateralism

After initially engaging with multilateral processes to address the trade issues arising out

of steel overcapacity, the Trump administration concluded that multilateral approaches

were likely too slow and ineffective to tackle the ‘China, Inc.’ challenge. Instead, they

undertook a calculated risk that unilateral pressure, ratcheted up over time, would be

more effective at changing Chinese behaviour. If it failed to do so, then they reasoned

that it would be better to force a gradual decoupling of the two economies, rather than

continuing to allow lopsided access to a strategic rival in technology and data.

Whether this calculated risk will pay off or not remains to be seen. Regardless of

outcome, however, trade multilateralism will have been severely weakened by the

Trump administration’s actions. For those seeking a return to a rules-based system,

there are five uncomfortable truths that they must confront.

First, the WTO negotiating process has become too ossified and ineffective. Even if the

WTO moves toward more plurilateral trade agreements, these are not likely to change

the underlying structure of ‘China, Inc.’ Instead, China can simply sit them out, as the

WTO’s plurilateral agreements require that benefits be extended on a most-favoured

nation basis. Some new modality for updating trade rules must be developed beyond

the existing available options.

Second, the remedies available against repeat violations are too weak for the

WTO dispute settlement system to function as an effective deterrent. There are no

consequences for presenting incomplete notifications of one’s subsidies. Nor are there

any for repeat violations. Unless remedies are strengthened, governments will remain

tempted to resort to power, rather than law, for any serious trade tensions that are time-

sensitive.

Third, the rules provide too much leeway for countries to hide behind the cover of

‘developing country status’ or ‘national security’ to escape their obligations. Allowing

adjudicators to opine on such issues, however, leaves a government open to accusations

that it has ceded sovereignty. While prior generations of trade negotiators may have

purposely sought to leave such terms ambiguous in the WTO agreements, the terms


Mark Wu

109

require greater clarity through further negotiations. Otherwise, they threaten to become

the exceptions that swallow the rule.

Fourth, it is unlikely that the issues can be addressed through bolder, more aggressive

use of WTO litigation. Drawing on testimony offered by Hillman (2018), some have

called for the US and its allies to build a large-scale non-violation, nullification and

impairment (NVNI) complaint against China. Obtaining the evidence necessary

to prevail on a NVNI claim will prove very difficult, as firms whose future growth

is dependent on China will be reluctant to cooperate. Even if this information is

forthcoming, the WTO first must find a way out of the Appellate Body crisis before its

judicial arm will be able to function properly once more.

Finally, any hope that regional trade agreements (RTA), such as the Comprehensive

and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), can serve as ‘building blocks’ for

establishing new rules that will eventually work their way into becoming multilateral

WTO rules is misplaced. China can simply mitigate the cost of trade diversion by

negotiating a competing agreement of its own. Unless the rules of origin in the CPTPP

and other similar agreements are tightened and the possibility of a complementary RTA

with China is foreclosed, the tactic of concluding RTAs among like-minded allies will

not generate enough fear within ‘China, Inc.’ to spur it to embrace new rules that run

contrary to its interests.

Will supporters of a multilateral trading system accept these uncomfortable truths and

confront their consequences? Even if they do, can they then get leaders to make hard

compromises and spark the reforms necessary for the WTO to adapt to meet the ‘China,

Inc.’ challenge? For now, the signs are not promising. If they continue to flounder, get

ready for more trade brinksmanship in the coming clash of economic systems.

References

Henry, J (2018), “The World in 2030”, HSBC, 28 September.

Hillman, J (2018), Testimony Before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review

Commission, Hearing on U.S. Tools to Address Chinese Market Distortions.

https://www.hsbc.com/news-and-insight/2018/the-world-in-2030


110

Janow, M and P Mavroidis (2019), “Digital Trade, E-Commerce, the WTO and Regional

Frameworks”, World Trade Review 18(2).

Lardy, N (2014), Markets Over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China, Peterson

Institute for International Economics

Lardy, N (2019), The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?,

Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Meltzer, J (2019), “Governing Digital Trade”, World Trade Review 18(2).

Pricewaterhouse Coopers (2017), The Long View: How Will the Global Economic

Order Change by 2050?

US Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship (2019), “Made in China

2025 and the Future of American Industry”.

USTR (2018), “Update Concerning China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to

Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation”.

WTO (2019), World Trade Profile Database (retrieved May 2019).


International Law Journal 57(2): 261-324.

About the author

Mark Wu is the Henry L. Stimson Professor at Harvard Law School. He also serves as

a Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard

University. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the WTO Chairs’ Programme and

the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Trade and Investment.

Prior to academia, he served as the Director for Intellectual Property in the Office

of the U.S. Trade Representative and as an economist and operations officer at the

World Bank. He received an A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard College, a M.Sc.

from Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), and a J.D. from Yale Law. He also studied as a

Monbusho Scholar at Kyoto University.

http://stat.wto.org/CountryProfile/WSDBcountryPFExportZip.aspx?Language=E

Trade WarThe Clash of Economic Systems Endangering Global Prosperity

Edited by Meredith A. Crowley

Centre for Economic Policy Research

33 Great Sutton Street London EC1V 0DXTel: +44 (0)20 7183 8801 Email: [email protected] www.cepr.org

The US-China trade war has upended the old rules for international trade policy cooperation. For the first time in decades, policymakers have imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of merchandise, disrupting global trade networks and inflicting harm on their own economies. With the latest round of bilateral negotiations breaking down without a deal, only time will tell if a cooperative solution has been permanently knocked off track or just hit a bump in the road. This collection of essays by leading economists and legal scholars reviews the origins of the US-China economic conflict, evaluates the costs of the trade war, and analyses what it means for the future of the multilateral trading system.

Beginning with China’s accession to the WTO, the book explores the effects of China’s global integration on US manufacturing workers, the system of WTO dispute settlement, and the implications of China’s rise as a global power. Assessments of the economic costs follow; contributions quantify which countries lose the most from trade wars, discuss how firms respond to changes in import tariffs, and explain and evaluate how the costs of the trade war propagate through global value chains. The closing chapters investigate the clash of economic systems at the centre of the US-China quarrel, the quiet growth of other measures restricting market access, the unresolved question of how to limit subsidies, and the rise in uncertainty about future trade policy. These difficult challenges require resolution. Nothing less than the future of the multilateral trading system and the global prosperity it has fostered are at stake.

9 781912 179206

ISBN 978-1-912179-20-6

CEPR Press

June 2019

CEPR Press

A VoxEU.org Book

Trade War: The Clash of Econom

ic Systems Endangering G

lobal Prosperity

edited by meredith a. crowleydigamoo.free.fr/tradewarcepr19.pdf · 2019-06-27 · the clash of...

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